Frank Beacham's Journal

August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, was born 172 years ago today

August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, was born 172 years ago today.

A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades. During that time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis and politics.

A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques.

From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his, The Red Room (1879), has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.

During the 1890s, he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become “the Zola of the Occult.”

In 1898, he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage.

His A Dream Play (1902) — with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging and multiplication of its characters — was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism.

Carl Sandburg, the poet and an urban folk singer, was born 143 years ago

Carl Sandburg, born 143 years ago today, was an early American urban folk singer. His 1927 anthology, American Songbag, influenced a young Pete Seeger, who called it a “landmark.”

Photo by William A. Smith

Carl Sandburg, the poet and an urban folk singer, was born 143 years ago.

Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."

Born in the three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, to parents of Swedish ancestry, Sandberg left school at the age of 13 and began driving a milk wagon. From 14 until he was 18, he worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg.

After that he was on the milk route again for eighteen months. He became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas.

After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, Sandberg became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature and film reviews.

Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina.

Sandburg volunteered to go to the military and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry during the Spanish–American War, disembarking at Guánica, Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898. He was never actually called to battle.

Sandburg attended West Point for just two weeks, before failing a mathematics and grammar exam. He returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard College, but left without a degree in 1903. He moved to Milwaukee and joined the Social Democratic Party, the name by which the Socialist Party of America was known in the state.

Sandburg served as a secretary to Emil Seidel, socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. He met Lilian Steichen at the Social Democratic Party office in 1907, and they married the next year. Lilian's brother was the photographer, Edward Steichen.

Sandburg with his wife, whom he called Paula, raised three daughters.

The Sandburgs moved to Harbert, Michigan and then to suburban Chicago. They lived in Evanston, Illinois, before settling at 331 S. York Street in Elmhurst, Illinois, from 1919 to 1930. He wrote three children's books in Elmhurst — Rootabaga Stories in 1922 followed by Rootabaga Pigeons (1923) and Potato Face (1930).

He also wrote Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a two-volume biography in 1926, The American Songbag (1927) and a book of poems, Good Morning, America (1928), in Elmhurst. In 1919, Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize "made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society" for his collection, Corn Huskers.

He won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for The War Years, the second volume of his Abraham Lincoln, and a second Poetry Pulitzer in 1951 for Complete Poems.

In 1945, he moved to Connemara, a 246-acre rural estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Here, he produced a little over a third of his total published work, and lived with his wife, daughters and two grandchildren.

On February 12, 1959, in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, Congress met in joint session to hear actor Fredric March give a dramatic reading of the Gettysburg Address, followed by an address by Sandburg. To date, Sandburg remains the only American poet ever invited to address a joint session of Congress.

Sandburg supported the civil rights movement, and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP with their Silver Plaque Award, proclaiming him to be a "major prophet of civil rights in our time."

Sandburg died of natural causes in 1967. His ashes were interred under "Remembrance Rock," a granite boulder located behind his birth house.

Sandburg's 1927 anthology, the American Songbag, enjoyed enormous popularity, going through many editions.

Sandburg himself was perhaps the first American urban folk singer, accompanying himself on solo guitar at lectures and poetry recitals, and in recordings, long before the first or the second folk revival movements (of the 1940s and 1960s, respectively).

According to musicologist Judith Tick: As a populist poet, Sandburg bestowed a powerful dignity on what the '20s called the "American scene" in a book he called a "ragbag of stripes and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth ... rich with the diversity of the United States."

Reviewed widely in journals ranging from the New Masses to Modern Music, the American Songbag influenced a number of musicians. Pete Seeger, who calls it a "landmark," saw it "almost as soon as it came out." The composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife, Hannah, "were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged."

Sandburg's home of 22 years in Flat Rock, Henderson County, North Carolina, is preserved by the National Park Service as the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Carl Sandburg College is located in Sandburg's birthplace of Galesburg, Illinois.

Here, Sandburg performs “I Ride An Old Paint”

Kenneth Rexroth, the San Francisco poet, was born 115 years ago today

Kenneth Rexroth, the San Francisco poet, was born 115 years ago today.

A poet, translator and critical essayist, Rexroth was a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. He paved the groundwork for the Beat movement.

Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was one of the major influences on the Beat generation, and was dubbed "Father of the Beats" by Time.

He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku.

With Rexroth acting as master of ceremonies, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen read at the famous poetry-reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955.

Rexroth later served as a defense witness at Ginsberg's obscenity trial concerning the event.

Rexroth had previously sent Ginsberg (new in the Bay Area) to meet Snyder, and was thus responsible for their friendship. Lawrence Ferlinghetti named Rexroth as one of his own mentors.

Rexroth appears in Jack Kerouac's novel, The Dharma Bums, as the character Reinhold Cacoethes.

Rexroth died in Santa Barbara in 1982. He was 77.

It’s the 263rd birthday today of William Blake, the English poet, painter and printmaker

It’s the 263rd birthday today of William Blake, the English poet, painter and printmaker.

Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language."

His visual artistry led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced."

In 2002, Blake was placed at #38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.

Although he lived in London his entire life (except for three years spent in Felpham), he produced a diverse and symbolically rich body of work, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God" or "human existence itself.”

Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterized as part of the Romantic movement.

Reverent of the Bible, but hostile to the Church of England (indeed, to all forms of organized religion), Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions.

Though later he rejected many of these beliefs he maintained an amiable relationship with Thomas Paine, he was also influenced by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg.

Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterized him as a "glorious luminary," and "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors.”

Blake had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s, frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg, songwriters Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Van Morrison and the English writer, Aldous Huxley.

Here is Blake’s 1786 painting Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. It’s from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

On this day in 1948 — 72 years ago — T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature, for his profound effect on the direction of modern poetry

On this day in 1948 — 72 years ago — T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature, for his profound effect on the direction of modern poetry.

Eliot was born in St. Louis to a long-established family. His grandfather had founded Washington University in St. Louis, his father was a businessman and his mother was involved in local charities.

Eliot received an undergraduate degree from Harvard, studied at the Sorbonne, returned to Harvard to learn Sanskrit and then studied at Oxford. He became lifelong friends with fellow poet, Ezra Pound, and later moved permanently to England.

In 1915, he married Vivian Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was unhappy, partly due to her mental instability. She died in an institution in 1947. Eliot began working at Lloyd's Bank in 1917, writing reviews and essays on the side. He founded a critical quarterly, Criterion, and quietly developed a new style of poetry.

His first major work, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, was published in 1917 and hailed as the invention of a new kind of poetry. His long, fragmented images and use of blank verse influenced nearly all future poets, as did his masterpiece, The Waste Land, published in Criterion and the American review, Dial, in 1922.

While Eliot is best known for revolutionizing modern poetry, his literary criticism and plays were also successful. Eliot lectured in the United States, frequently in the 1930s and 40s, a time when his own worldview was undergoing rapid change as he converted to Christianity.

In 1957, he married his assistant, Valerie Fletcher.

Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London on January 4, 1965.

Here, Eliot is shown on the porch of the wood-shingled home that his father built on Eastern Point in Gloucester, Massachusetts

John Keats, the English romantic poet, was born 225 years ago today

John Keats, the English romantic poet, was born 225 years ago today.

Keats was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his lifetime, his reputation grew after his death.

By the end of the 19th century, he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets.

Keats had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.

The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery most notably in the series of odes. Today, his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature.

Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

Ezra Pound, the poet, was born 135 years ago today

Ezra Pound, the poet, was born 135 years ago today.

An expatriate poet and critic and a major figure of the early modernist movement, Pound’s contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement that derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language.

His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–1969).

Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway.

He was responsible for the publication in 1915 of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and for the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses.

Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."

Outraged by the loss of life during the First World War, he lost faith in England, blaming the war on usury and international capitalism.

He moved to Italy in 1924, where throughout the 1930s and 1940s, to his friends' dismay, he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist, Oswald Mosley.

The Italian government paid him during the Second World War to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and, in particular, Jews. As a result, he was arrested for treason by American forces in Italy in 1945.

He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including 25 days in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown, "when the raft broke and the waters went over me.”

Deemed unfit to stand trial, a decision disputed for decades after his death, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. for over 12 years. While in custody in Italy, he had begun work on sections of The Cantos that became known as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress.

The award triggered enormous controversy, mostly because of his antisemitism and the charge of treason, and in part because it raised literary questions about whether a supposedly "mad" poet who held such contentious views could produce work of any value.

He was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958, thanks to a protracted campaign by his fellow writers, and returned to live in Italy until his death. His political views ensure that his work remains controversial.

Pound shown in 1913.

Photo by Alvin Langdon Coburn

Dylan Thomas was born 106 years ago today

Dylan Thomas at the bar of the White Horse Tavern, 1952

Dylan Thomas was born 106 years ago today.

A Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems, "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” "And Death Shall have No Dominion,” the "Play for Voices,” Under Milk Wood and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

Thomas became popular in his lifetime, and remained popular after his death — partly due to his larger than life character and his reputation for drinking to excess.

Born in Swansea, Wales in 1914, Thomas was undistinguished student. He left school at 16, becoming a journalist for a short time. Although many of his works appeared in print while a teenager, it was the publication of "Light breaks where no sun shines,” published in 1934, that caught the attention of the literary world.

While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, whom he married in 1937. Their relationship was defined by alcoholism and was mutually destructive. In the early part of his marriage, Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth, settling in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne.

Although Thomas was appreciated as a popular poet in his lifetime, he found earning a living as a writer difficult, which resulted in Thomas augmenting his income with readings and broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the latter half of the 1940s brought him a level of celebrity.

In the 1950s, Thomas travelled to America, where his readings brought him a level of fame, though his erratic behavior and drinking worsened. His time in America cemented Thomas' legend, where he recorded to vinyl works such as A Child's Christmas in Wales.

The Scottish poet, Ruthven Todd, introduced Thomas to the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, and the great Welsh bard was soon quaffing oceans of ale in the Horse's back room. Thomas made the tavern his headquarters on his tumultuous stateside forays, and soon tourists were lining up eight deep at the bar to watch him carouse.

Today, a plaque on the wall commemorates the November night in 1953 when the poet — still only 39 — downed one last shot, staggered outside and collapsed. After falling into a coma at the nearby Chelsea Hotel, he was whisked to St. Vincent's Hospital where he died.

Throughout his life, Thomas was close to attorney William Kunstler, who discovered him while a French major at Yale. Kunstler published one of his books, represented Thomas and was called to join him at the hospital after he collapsed outside the White Horse Tavern.

Although writing exclusively in the English language, Thomas has been acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century. Noted for his original, rhythmic and ingenious use of words and imagery, Thomas' position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed, though this has not tarnished his popularity amongst the general public, who found his work accessible.

Here, Thomas reads “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night”

Sylvia Plath was born 88 years ago today

Sylvia Plath on the beach, June, 1954

Photo by Gordon Ames Lameyer

Sylvia Plath was born 88 years ago today.

A poet, novelist and short story writer, Plath was born in Boston and studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer.

She married fellow poet, Ted Hughes, in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England. They had two children together, Frieda and Nicholas.

After suffering from depression from the age of 20 and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel.

In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems.

She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.

Here, Plath reads “Daddy”

Beat poet Diane di Prima died on Sunday at the age of 86

Beat poet Diane di Prima died on Sunday at the age of 86. No cause of death was given.

di Prima was also an artist, prose writer, memoirist, playwright, social justice activist, fat acceptance activist and teacher. She authored nearly four dozen books, with her work translated into more than 20 languages.

Born in Brooklyn in 1934, she attended Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan. She was "a second generation American of Italian descent" and her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman.

Di Prima began writing as a child and by the age of 19 was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, was published in 1958 by Hettie Jones and LeRoi Jones' Totem Press.

Di Prima spent the late 1950s and early 1960s in Manhattan, where she participated in the emerging Beat movement. She spent some time in California at Stinson Beach and Topanga Canyon, returned to New York City and eventually moved to San Francisco permanently. Di Prima was a bridge figure between the Beat movement and the later hippies, as well as between East Coast and West Coast artists.

She edited the newspaper The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press.

On several occasions she faced charges of obscenity by the United States government due to her work with the New York Poets Theatre and The Floating Bear. In 1961 she was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for publishing two poems in The Floating Bear.

According to di Prima, police persistently harassed her due to the nature of her poetry. In 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary's psychedelic community and printed the first two editions of "Psychedelic Prayers" by Leary in Spring 1966.

In 1969, she wrote a fictionalized, erotic account detailing her experience in the Beat movement titled Memoirs of a Beatnik. From 1974 to 1997, di Prima taught Poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, sharing the program with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg (co-founder of the program), William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and others. In 2001, she published Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years.