1913: "A Lullaby" by Irma Spriggs

A Lullaby
Out mid the breakers the tide maketh moan
Sleep, baby, little one, sleep.
Father, the fisherman, ne’er cometh home.
Sleep, baby, little one, sleep.
Far o’er the ocean the dull leaden sky
Weeps out its heart for a day that is by,
Wild ‘gainst the black rocks, the wind rages high.
Sleep, baby, sleep; rock-a-bye.

Heed not the wind nor the rain nor the sea.
Sleep, baby, little one, sleep.
Mother’s lone arms still thy shelter shall be,
Sleep, baby, little one, sleep.
Sleep, though the treacherous tides nearer creep;
Sleep, though the winds round our frail cottage sweep.
Sleep, though sad hearts e’er a vigil shall keep
Till life, like thee, baby, sleep.

The Author:
Irma Spriggs
A native of Missouri, Spriggs joined the East Central Normal School faculty in 1911 as an Assistant in the Department of English at a time when East Central was both a high school and a two-year college. With a Master’s degree in Pedagogy, Spriggs was one of three faculty members in the department at the time. She was educated at Springfield State Normal School in her home state and later at the University of Chicago (in 1919, five of the 20 faculty members whose photos appear in the college yearbook, Pesagi, list the University of Chicago as one of their places where they were educated).

“A Few Established Rules,” a poem which appears in the 1916 Pesagi, suggests that Spriggs ran a tight ship in her classroom: “If you feel just/A little bit ‘bossy,’/And think that you can/Act and talk ‘saucy’—Try it on Miss Spriggs.” (32)

1919 appears to have been her last year at East Central.

In the 1917 Pesagi, a representative quote appears alongside the photo of each faculty member. The quote beside Spriggs's photo reads: “Well, so much for that.” (21)

SUBMITTED BY: Steve Benton
WORKS CITED:
Pesagi. East Central State Normal yearbook: 1913, 1916, 1917.
IMAGE SOURCE:
Pesagi. East Central State Normal yearbook: 1913.

1926: "Criteria of Negro Art" by W. E. B. Dubois

The Author:
W. E. B. Dubois
Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced: “doo BOYZ”) graduated from Fisk University in Nashville in 1888 and seven years later became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. From 1897-1910, he taught economics, history, and sociology at Atlanta University. It was during this period that he published his best-known work, The Souls of Black Folk (1900), which called for the development of an elite African American intellectual and professional class, which Du Bois would refer to as the “talented tenth.” After helping found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, he edited the organization’s monthly magazine, The Crisis, from 1910-1934. He returned to Atlanta University in 1933 and taught there until 1944. From 1952-1958, the U.S. government revoked his passport because of his outspoken admiration for the Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. In 1961, at the age of 93, he joined the Communist Party USA and moved to Ghana (in West Africa), where he died in 1963, one day before Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D. C..

The Text:
“Criteria of Negro Art”
In this address, delivered at the Chicago Conference of the NAACP, Du Bois “insists on the need for art to function as agitation, protest” and “advance the cause of the race” (Leitch et al. 979).

Excerpts:
“We can go on the stage; we can be just as funny as white Americans wish us to be; we can play all the sordid parts that America likes to assign to Negroes; but for any thing else there is still small place for us.” (984-985) [The image at left is of Bert Williams (1875-1922), a light-skinned African-American who, wearing blackface, became one of the most successful Vaudevillian comedians of his era.]

“…all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not give a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.” (985-986)

“…it is not the positive propaganda of people who believe white blood divine, infallible and holy to which I object. It is the denial of a similar right of propaganda to those who believe black blood human, lovable and inspired with new ideals for the world.” (986)

1924: Literature and Revolution by Leon Trotsky

The Author: Leon Trotsky

Born in Ukraine (then a Russian province) in 1879, Lev Davidovich Bronstein was exiled to Siberia when he was twenty years old as punishment for his revolutionary activity in support of farmers and peasants. After his escape from prison, he began using the name "Leon Trotsky" and moved to London, where he and Vladimir Lenin edited a Russian-language journal. On his return to Russia in 1905, he was imprisoned again, and escaped a second time, in 1907. During World War I, he was deported from France and was working as a journalist in New York City in February 1917, when Lenin led the uprising that ousted the czar of Russia. By May of that year, Trotsky was back in Russia and less than a year later, he had become head of the Red Army. At the time of Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky was the most prominent leader in Russia, but he was politically outmanuevered by Joseph Stalin, whose allies had him expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, deported in 1928, and, in 1941, assassinated in his home in Mexico.

An accomplished writer, speaker and theorist, Trotsky "insists that history shapes artistic production and that innovation in art arises from the pressures of historical context," yet he advocated a practical cultural policy that was "flexible and nondogmatic" in its approach to art.

The Text:

Literature and Revolution

This collection of essays was published by the Soviet government six months after Lenin's death. Six months later, its author was forced to resign his leadership position in the Russian military.

Excerpts:
“Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. But . .. [if] one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one’s life, without seeing oneself in the ‘mirror’ of literature?” (Trotsky 136)

"The effort to set art free from life, to declare it a craft sufficient unto itself, devitalizes and kills art. The very need of such an operation is an unmistakable symptom of intellectual decline." (1015)

"It is not true that we regard only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and it is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets should describe inevitably a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital! ...the plough of the new art is not limited to numbered strips. On the contrary, it must plow the entire field in all directions. Personal lyrics of the very smallest scope have an absolute right to exist within the new art. Moreover, the new man cannot be formed without a new lyric poetry." (1010) The image of the captured factory chimneys in the poster at left reads "Death to World Imperialism!"; it was designed in 1920.

"The form of art is, to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for creating form and the other for appreciating it. They are living people, with a crystallized psychology representing a certain unity, even if not entirely harmonious. This psychology is the result of social conditions. The creation and perception of art forms is one of the functions of this psychology." (1010)

"However fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to the point of his landlady's unpaid bill." (1013)

". . . one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why." (1014)

WORKS CITED

Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan Press, 1968.

IMAGE SOURCE:

http://www.warchat.org/history/history-europe/russian-civil-war-1918-1920.html

http://sovietposter.blogspot.com/search/label/Twenties

Trotsky on Stalinism (He was not a fan)

I think Trotsky gave this speech from Mexico for the benefit of the Dewey Commission in 1937.

1919: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot

Author: T. S. Eliot.
Born in St. Louis in 1888, Eliot got his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1909 and got his master's degree there in 1910. In 1914, he moved to England, where he remained for most of the rest of his life. Eliot worked at Lloyd's Bank in London between 1917 and 1925 and it was during this period that he published, "The Waste Land," which some consider the most influential poem of the 20th century. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen.

The "central Anglo-American poet and critic of the twentieth century," Eliot "defined the critical standards of an era, recast the literary tradition, and establisehd key terms for analysis and evaluation." (Leitch et al., 1088) He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1948.

The Text: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) first appeared in The Egoist--An Individualist Review, an a monthly magazine where Eliot worked as an assistant editor between 1917 and 1919.

Excerpts:
We critics have a "tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." (1092-1093)

"... art never improves, but . . . the material of art is never quite the same." (1094)

"The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." (1094)

"Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." (1095)

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." (1097) [The image at left is a still from 1921 motion picture The Goat, starring comic actor Buster Keaton, one of the most successful stars of the silent film era (which came to a close around 1927). Keaton’s nickname was “The Great Stone Face.” Click here to see a clip.)

"The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him." (1097)

IMAGE SOURCE:
http://openreflections.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/ts-eliot.jpg
http://pushingposes.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html

1922: "The Waste Land: Part I: The Burial of the Dead" by T. S. Eliot

This is the first of the poem's four parts. It is read by the author.

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar kine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow.
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth girl."
–Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!"

Click here for a hypertext version of the poem with commentary on its many allusions.

These are Eliot's notes:

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.

I. The Burial of the Dead

Line 20. Cf. Ezekiel II, i.
23. Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v.
31. V. Tristan und Isolde, I, verses 5-8.
42. Id, III, verse 24.
46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the "crowds of people," and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself
60. Cf. Baudelaire:
"Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
"Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant."
63. Cf. Inferno III, 55-57:
"si Iunga tratta
di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta."
64, Cf. Inferno IV, 25-27:
"Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
"non avea pianto, ma' che di sospiri,
"che l'aura eterna facevan tremare."
68, A phenomenon which I have often noticed.
74, Cf. the Dirge in Webster's White Devil.
76. V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal.

1921: The Goat--Starring Buster Keaton

This 5-minute, 18-second clip is the first of three: