Introduction to Literature
Lesson eight: brooks, larkin, hudgins
Teenagers
Margarette connor
Teenagers
 Teenage as a social construct. In post-war period,
America was prosperous, and teenagers then were
given a lot of freedom and material support.
 These teenagers started to be rebellious. Rock ‘N
Roll further separated them from the main stream
society.
 Teenage years is a period of difficult time also
because of the hormonal changes that happen to
every teenager.
 Literary writers present some of these problems.
These works have more resonance to our students.
 Enjoy them!!!
Contents
 Gwendolyn Brooks
 “We Be Cool” discussion
 Philip Larkin
 “This Be the Verse” discussion
 Andrew Hudgins
 blank verse
 “Seventeen” discussion
Gwendolyn Brooks
 the first African-American writer to both win the
Pulitzer Prize (1949) and to be appointed to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters (1976)
 won countless awards during her writing career.
 received more than fifty honorary doctorates
from colleges and universities.
 1969, the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center
opened on the campus of Western Illinois
University
African-American poet
 offers readers
– insight into African-American culture,
– commentary on the impact of racial and
ethnic identity on life,
– a vision of the pressures of day-to-day
existence throughout all of her
literature.
Most dominant theme
 “the impact of ethnicity and life
experiences on one's view of life.”
Parents
 Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917
 Father, David Anderson Brooks
 Mother, Keziah Corine Wims
 Raised in Chicago, the city that will
always be associated with Brooks.
 She died in Chicago, 2000.
Much encouragement
 Her mother believed that she could be the
“lady Paul Laurence Dunbar” and
encouraged her daughter’s writing.
 When young she also attended many poetry
readings by African-American writers such
as Langston Hughes.
 At thirteen she had her first poem
published.
Education
 Attended Wilson Junior College, graduated
in 1936
 After attended a poetry workshop at the
South Side Community Art Center,
– studied the major modernists and according to
one biographer, got introduced to “the rigors of
poetic technique”
 In 1937 her work appeared in two
anthologies.
Marriage
 In 1939 married Henry Blakely
 They had two children.
 While bringing them up, started to
produce a number of volumes of
poetry
In the 1940s-60s
 During this time, her fame grew, but
according to many critics, she didn’t
get the honors she deserved.
 This was only because she was black.
Brooks’s novel, 1953
Political change
 In 1967 attended the second Black
Writers’ Conference and met a
number of young black poets
 They convinced her that
– “black poets should write as blacks,
about blacks, and address themselves as
blacks.”
– Up to that point, she didn’t feel that she
was “writing consciously with the ideas
that blacks must address blacks”.
Revitalized
 She began to teach verse-writing for
a group of Chicago teenagers called
the Blackstone Rangers.
 Also became an activist leader.
 During this period, she sought to
“clarify her language” so that she
could reach wider audiences,
specifically, “to all manner of blacks”
More than twenty books of poetry,
 Children Coming Home 1991
 Blacks (1987);
 The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems
(1986);
 Riot (1969);
 In the Mecca (1968);
 The Bean Eaters (1960);
 Annie Allen (1949), which received the Pulitzer
Prize; and
 A Street in Bronzeville (1945).
Many other volumes
 Including:
 Maud Martha, a novel (1953)
 Report from Part One: An
Autobiography (1972)
Other major honors
 In 1968 she was named Poet
Laureate for the State of Illinois
 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
 1985-86, Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress.
On “We Real Cool,” interview 1970
 They have no pretensions to any glamor. They are
supposedly dropouts, or at least they're in the
poolroom when they should possibly be in school,
since they're probably young enough, or at least
those I saw were when I looked in a poolroom, and
they. . . . First of all, let me tell you how that's
supposed to be said, because there's a reason why
I set it out as I did. These are people who are
essentially saying, "Kilroy is here. We are." But
they're a little uncertain of the strength of their
identity.
Think about the “we”
 The "We"—you're supposed to stop
after the "We" and think about their
validity, and of course there's no way
for you to tell whether it should be
said softly or not, I suppose, but I
say it rather softly because I want to
represent their basic uncertainty,
which they don't bother to question
every day, of course.
We Real Cool
We real cool.
We Left school.
We Lurk (hang out) late.
We Strike (shoot people) straight.
We Sing sin.
We Thin gin.
We Jazz June.
We Die soon.
A very powerful poem.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
 “Deprivation is for me what daffodils
were for Wordsworth.”
Major voice of the 20th century
 "It is part of his poems' strength to speak
directly to most people who come across them. He
makes each of us feel that he is 'our' poet, in a
way that Eliot, for instance, does not - and each of
us creates a highly personal version of his
character to accompany his work. Pointing out that
he was contradictory doesn't pose much of a
threat to these versions. It's more disturbing,
however, to say that many of Larkin's inner
conflicts evolved in ways his work can only hint at.
(con’t next slide)
Quote continued
 When he found his authentic voice in the late
1940s, the beautiful flowers of his poetry were
already growing on long stalks out of pretty dismal
ground.... He understood that the relationship he
had created between 'high' art and 'ordinary'
existence was a remarkable one, which deserved
to be made public.”
 from his biography by Andrew Motion
Negative image revealed
 In the biography we see a man who is:
– racist,
– right-wing,
– selfish,
– cruel to his partners.
 Friends say this isn’t the whole
picture, though.
Famous for three volumes of poetry:
 The Less Deceived (1955)
 The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
 High Windows (1974)
Other works
 First volume of poems The North
Ship
 Two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in
Winter (1947)
 Volumes of jazz criticism and essays
 Edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth
Century English Verse (1973)
Parents
 Born August 9, 1922, in Coventry,
England.
 Father Sydney Larkin, City
Treasurer, 1922-44
– Nazi sympathiser
– died when Larkin was 25.
 Mother Eva was “coddling, snobbish
and discontented.”
Larkin on his parents:
 “The marriage left me with two
convictions: that human beings should
not live together, and that children
should be taken from their parents at
an early age."
Education
 Attended the Coventry’s King Henry
VIII School, 1930-1940.
 On to St. John's College, Oxford.
– didn’t have to go to war because of his
poor eyesight.
 While at Oxford met his close friend,
novelist Kingsley Amis.
 Graduated 1943.
First major publication
 1945, ten of his poems, appeared in
Poetry from Oxford in Wartime.
 Later that year they were included in
The North Ship, his first volume of
poetry.
Mixed influences
 “Looking back, I find in the poems not one
abandoned self but several – the ex-schoolboy, for
whom Auden was the only alternative to ‘oldfashioned’ poetry; the under-graduate, whose work
a friend affably characterized as ‘Dylan Thomas,
but you’ve a sentimentality that’s all your own’; and
the immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in
Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the
local girls’ school. (con’t on next slide)
continued
 “This search for a style was merely one aspect of
a general immaturity. It might be pleaded that the
war years were a bad time to start writing poetry,
but in fact the principal poets of the day – Eliot,
Auden, Dylan Thomas, Betjeman – were all
speaking out loud and clear...”
Career as a librarian
 1943, librarian at Wellington,
Shropshire,
 1946, assistant librarian at the
University College of Leicester
 1955, librarian at the University of
Hull
– position he remained in until his
retirement
The Less Deceived 1955
 Because of this volume, Larkin
became the preeminent poet of his
generation,
 Leading voice of what came to be
called "The Movement,"
– a group of young English writers who
rejected the prevailing fashion for neoRomantic writing in the style of Yeats
and Dylan Thomas.
Intensely emotional poetry
 Like Hardy, one of his own favorite
poets, Larkin focused on intense
personal emotion but strictly avoided
sentimentality or self-pity.
The two major volumes
 Whitsun Wedding, 1964
 High Windows, 1971
 “collections whose searing, often
mocking, wit does not conceal the
poet's dark vision and underlying
obsession with universal themes of
mortality, love, and human solitude”
Poet Laureate offer
 December 1984, offered the chance
to succeed Sir John Betjeman as Poet
Laureate.
 declined, being unwilling to accept the
high public profile and associated
media attention of the position.
– Ted Hughes went on to take the position.
Death
 Summer 1985 diagnosed with cancer.
 Died December, 1985.
This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Andrew Hudgins, 1951-
 "one of America's most accessible,
natural poets."
Military family
 Born in Killeen, Texas, in 1951.
 Father in the military, so they moved
a lot.
 Through all the moves family
remained distinctively Southern,
– his parents' taking their Southern
Baptist religion and their regional values
and manners with them as they traveled
from post to post.
Education
 Attended high school in Montgomery,
Alabama.
 Attended Huntingdon College and the
University of Alabama.
 Admitted to the prestigious Writers
Workshop at the University of Iowa,
where he earned MFA, 1983.
Major works
 Babylon in a Jar (1998)
 The Glass Hammer: A Southern
Childhood (1994)
 The Never-Ending: New Poems (1991)
 After the Lost War: A Narrative (1988)
 Saints and Strangers (1985)
– short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize.
 book of essays, The Glass Anvil (1997)
Educator and poet
 Currently is writer-in-residence and
head of the writing program at the
University of Cincinnati.
 Previously taught at
Baylor University.
Genesis of his “characters”
 They are a “combination of personal
experience, borrowed experience from
other people, and so, of course, that means
people's stories that they told you.
There's only our personal experiences and
other people's experiences that we can
have. Other people's experience comes
through books and through what they tell
you. Then there's also the imagination in
play. (con’t next slide)
On his characters
 “Those things mesh together so that
one element can be something that
happened to you but is not interesting
enough or doesn't go where you need
it to go, so you borrow something
that someone else told you or that
you've read, and they merge and
produce a new fact.”
Blank verse
 “Although verse described as blank
is, strictly, no more than unrhymed,
the term is limited to unrhymed
iambic pentameter…. It was chosen
by Milton for Paradise Lost and has
since been used more than any other
form for serious verse in English.”
– From Beckson and Ganz, Literary Terms,
a Dictionary.
Reasons went back to blank verse
 “With free verse, I never could figure out why the
lines stopped where they stopped; it never made
any sense to me. And we never talked about it, not
in workshops, and not in groups of people that I
would meet with, and some of those people were
very smart. So I couldn't figure out why the line
should stop one place and not another. That's one
of the reasons I first started messing around with
blank verse. Some people say that in free verse,
because you're not locked into that beat count in
the lines, the lines are more sensual, but they did
not work that way for me.”
“Over-intellectualized” poetry
 “What happened with me was because the line
could stop anywhere, it became overintellectualized, which is "a line breaking here for
this reason will set up this over here, which will do
this over here," and once I started writing in
meter, I knew that the line had to have these five
beats in it, and I wanted to have this kind of a
weight on the last foot, then everything became
not an intellectual decision, but a sensual decision:
Why it’s sensual:
 Poetry of the senses:
 “how hard a beat is this beat going to be, how is
the rhythm carrying over the meter going to spill
down into the next line beneath it, or am I going to
have a hard stop at the end of that line, those are
all musical decisions, and that, then, freed me up
to think about the content things going on in
meter and rhythm.”