Frank Beacham's Journal

Carl Sandburg, poet and an urban folk singer, was born 144 years ago

Photo by William A. Smith

Carl Sandburg, poet and an urban folk singer, was born 144 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”

Khalil Gibran, Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer of the New York Pen League, was born 139 years ago

Khalil Gibran, Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer of the New York Pen League, was born 139 years ago.

Born in the town of Bsharri in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Empire (north of modern-day Lebanon) to Khalil Gibran and Kamila Gibran (Rahmeh), Gibran immigrated with his family as a young man to the United States, where he studied art and began his literary career, writing in both English and Arabic.

In the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a literary and political rebel. His romantic style was at the heart of a renaissance in modern Arabic literature, especially prose poetry, breaking away from the classical school. In Lebanon, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.

He is chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book, The Prophet, an early example of inspirational fiction including a series of philosophical essays written in poetic English prose.

The book sold well despite a cool critical reception, gaining popularity in the 1930s and again especially in the 1960s counterculture.

Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Laozi.

Kenneth Rexroth, San Francisco poet, was born 116 years ago today

Kenneth Rexroth, San Francisco poet, was born 116 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.

Ossie Davis was born 104 years ago today

Ossie Davis was born 104 years ago today.

A film, television and Broadway actor, director, poet, playwright, author and social activist, Davis was married to actress/activist Ruby Dee. Guy Davis, the blues singer, is their son.

Born as Raiford Chatman Davis in Cogdell, Clinch County, Georgia, Davis is a son of Kince Charles Davis, a railway construction engineer, and his wife, Laura. The name Ossie came from a county clerk who misheard his mother's pronunciation of his initials "R.C." when he was born.

So he inadvertently became "Ossie" when his mother told the courthouse clerk in Clinch County, Ga., who was filing his birth certificate that his name was R.C. Davis.

The young Davis experienced racism from an early age when the KKK threatened to shoot his father, whose job they felt was too advanced for a black man to have.

Following the wishes of his parents, he attended Howard University but dropped out in 1939 to fulfill his acting career in New York. He later attended Columbia University School of General Studies. His acting career, which spanned eight decades, began in 1939 with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem.

During World War II, Davis served in the United States Army in the Medical Corps. He made his film debut in 1950 in the Sidney Poitier film, No Way Out. He voiced Anansi the spider on the PBS children's television series, Sesame Street, in its animation segments.

When Davis wanted to pursue a career in acting, he ran into the usual roadblocks that blacks suffered at that time as they generally could only portray stereotypical characters such as Stepin Fetchit. Instead, he tried to follow the example of Sidney Poitier and play more distinguished characters.

When he found it necessary to play a Pullman porter or a butler, he tried to portray the character seriously and not in a stereotypical manner.

In addition to acting, Davis, along with Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks, was one of the notable African-American directors of his generation. He directed movies like Gordon's War, Black Girl and the action film, Cotton Comes to Harlem.

Along with Bill Cosby and Poitier, Davis was one of a handful of African American actors able to find commercial success while avoiding stereotypical roles prior to 1970. He had a significant role in the 1965 movie, The Hill, alongside Sean Connery plus roles in The Cardinal and The Scalphunters.

However, Davis never had the tremendous commercial or critical success that Cosby and Poitier enjoyed. As a playwright, Davis wrote Paul Robeson: All-American, which is frequently performed in theatre programs for young audiences.

Davis found recognition late in his life by working in several of director Spike Lee's films, including Do The Right Thing, Jungle Fever, She Hate Me and Get on the Bus. He also found work as a commercial voice-over artist and served as the narrator of the early-1990s CBS sitcom, Evening Shade, starring Burt Reynolds. He also played one of the residents of a small southern town.

In 1999, he appeared as a theater caretaker in the Trans-Siberian Orchestra film, The Ghosts of Christmas Eve, which was released on DVD two years later.

For many years, he hosted the annual National Memorial Day Concert from Washington, DC. His distinguished bearing made him a perfect choice for the concert.

Davis's last role was a several episode guest role on the Showtime drama series, The L Word, as a father struggling with the acceptance of his daughter Bette (Jennifer Beals) parenting a child with her lesbian partner.

In his final episodes, his character was taken ill and died. His wife, Ruby Dee, was present during the filming of his own death scene. That episode, which aired shortly after Davis's own death, aired with a dedication to the actor.

In 1989, Ossie Davis and his wife, actress/activist Ruby Dee, were named to the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame.

In 1995, they were awarded the National Medal of Arts, the nation's highest honor conferred to an individual artist on behalf of the country and presented in a White House ceremony by the President of the United States. And in 2004, they were recipients of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors.

In 1948, Davis married Dee. In their joint autobiography — With Ossie and Ruby — they described their decision to have an open marriage (later changing their minds).

In the mid 1960s, they moved to the New York suburb of New Rochelle where they remained ever after. Their son, Guy Davis, the blues musician, is a former actor. He appeared in the film, Beat Street, and the daytime soap opera, One Life to Live. Their daughters are Nora Davis Day and Hasna Muhammad.

David and Dee were well known civil rights activists, and were close friends of Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other icons of the era. Their deep involvement in the movement is characterized by how instrumental they were in organizing the 1963 civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, even to the point of serving as emcee.

Davis, alongside Ahmed Osman, delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X. He re-read part of this eulogy at the end of Spike Lee's film, Malcolm X. He also delivered a stirring tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, at a memorial in New York's Central Park the day after King was assassinated in Memphis.

Davis was found dead in a Miami hotel room on February 9, 2005. He was 87.

An official cause of death was not released, but he had heart problems. He died a year after his mother, who died a month before her 106th birthday.

Kenneth Patchen, poet and novelist, was born 110 years ago today

Kenneth Patchen, poet and novelist, was born 110 years ago today.

Patchen experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing and jazz into his works, which were often compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman.

Patchen's biographer wrote that he "developed in his fabulous fables, love poems and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world's violence."

Along with his friend and peer, Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence over the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation.

He died in January, 1972 at age 60.

Rainer Maria Rilke, poet, was born 146 years ago today

Rainer Maria Rilke, poet, was born 146 years ago today.

A Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, Rilke is one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described his work as inherently "mystical."

Rilke’s writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and profound anxiety. These deeply existential themes tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist writers.

Rilke was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, travelled extensively throughout Europe, including Russia, Spain, Germany, France and Italy. In his later years, settled in Switzerland. These settings were key to the genesis and inspiration for many of his poems.

While Rilke is most known for his contributions to German literature, over 400 poems were originally written in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

In the later 20th century, his work has found new audiences through its use by New Age theologians and self-help authors, and through frequent quoting in television programs, books and motion pictures. In the United States, Rilke remains among the more popular, best-selling poets.

In the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Before long his wife left their daughter with her parents and joined Rilke there. The relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life.

A mutually agreed-upon effort at divorce was bureaucratically hindered by Rilke's "official" status as a Catholic, though a non-practicing one.

Rilke became deeply involved in the sculpture of Rodin, and then with the work of Paul Cézanne. For a time, he acted as Rodin's secretary, also lecturing and writing a long essay on Rodin and his work.

Rodin taught him the value of objective observation, and under this influence, Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work into something quite new in European literature.

In the United States, Rilke is one of the more popular, best-selling poets — along with 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi (1207–1273), and 20th-century Lebanese-American poet, Khalil Gibran (1883–1931).

In 1929, a minor writer, Franz Xaver Kappus (1883–1966), published a collection of ten letters that Rilke had written to him when he was a 19-year-old officer cadet studying at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt.

The young Kappus wrote to Rilke, who had also attended the academy, between 1902 and 1908 when he was uncertain about his future career as a military officer or as a poet. Initially, he sought Rilke's advice as to the quality of his poetry, and whether he ought to pursue writing as a career.

While he declined to comment on Kappus's writings, Rilke advised Kappus on how a poet should feel, love and seek truth in trying to understand and experience the world around him and engage the world of art.

These letters offer insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke's poetry and his working process. Further, these letters were written during a key period of Rilke's early artistic development after his reputation as a poet began to be established with the publication of parts of Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours) and Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images).

In 1926, Rilke was diagnosed as having leukemia. He died at the age of 51 in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926 in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland.

William Blake, English poet, painter and printmaker, was born 264 years ago today

It’s the 264th birthday today of William Blake, 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.

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

John Keats, English romantic poet, was born 226 years ago today

John Keats, English romantic poet, was born 226 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, poet, was born 136 years ago today

Ezra Pound, poet, was born 136 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 show in 1913.

Photo by Alvin Langdon Coburn

Dylan Thomas was born 107 years ago today

Dylan Thomas drinks at the bar at the White Horse Tavern, New York City, 1952

Dylan Thomas was born 107 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”

Photo by Lee Miller