The lyric perfection of the works of Alfred Tennyson, one of the greatest Victorian poets, and the apparent ease with which he wrote them, long obscured the disparity between the unruffled surface of many of his poems and his deeply disturbed life. Somersby Rectory, where Tennyson was born, was made miserable by drunkenness, drug addiction, threats of violence, melodramatic disinheritances, and above all by the fear of madness. He found an anodyne for his unhappiness in the composition of poetry, and was so successful in this refuge from the bewildering complexities of his life that he eventually became Poet Laureate and the most famous of living writers. Until he was forty years old the belief that he suffered from inherited epilepsy kept Tennyson unsettled, neurotic about money, immature in his relations with women, and apprehensive of marriage. It was a belief that gave shape to some of his finest poetry. At the end of his life Tennyson's wife and son constructed a public facade for him of irreproachable normality and respectability. Robert Bernard Martin was the first biographer to go behind the mask of the troubled poet to investigate his black-tempered morbidity, and neurotic secrecy about his private life. More importantly, it often reveals the sources of the successes and failures of the foremost Victorian poet. From many thousands of letters by Tennyson, his family, and his friends, as well as much other unpublished material, Robert Bernard Martin has distilled a sensitive and sympathetic portrait of Tennyson, both as his contemporaries saw him and as he was in private. 'Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart will stand as one of the great literary biographies of this century.' A. N. Wilson, The Spectator
The ascendancy of science pushed aside Emerson's view of nature as an analogue for a kind and benevolent deity and led to a spiritual crisis that Robert Frost attempted to address in his work. Hass (English, Edinboro U. of Pennsylvania) argues that this was the central concern of Frost's work throughout his career. Frost consistently argued that poetry must seek to find a consistent rationality that strives towards wisdom and firmly rejected Poe's conception of poetry as mere ornament or the more revolutionary conceptions of the American Modernists. Hass traces Frost's career as one in which he slowly overcame his fear of materialism and was able to restore his religious faith. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The third installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of Robert Frost’s correspondence. The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the latest installment in Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. It presents 589 letters, of which 424 are previously uncollected. The critically acclaimed first volume, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, included nearly 300 previously uncollected letters, and the second volume 350 more. During the period covered here, Robert Frost was close to the height of his powers. If Volume 2 covered the making of Frost as America’s poet, in Volume 3 he is definitively made. These were also, however, years of personal tribulation. The once-tight Frost family broke up as marriage, illness, and work scattered the children across the country. In the case of Frost’s son Carol, both distance and proximity put strains on an already fractious relationship. But the tragedy and emotional crux of this volume is the death, in Montana, of Frost’s youngest daughter, Marjorie. Frost’s correspondence from those dark days is a powerful testament to the difficulty of honoring the responsibilities of a poet’s eminence while coping with the intensity of a parent’s grief. Volume 3 also sees Frost responding to the crisis of the Great Depression, the onset of the New Deal, and the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, with wit, canny political intelligence, and no little acerbity. All the while, his star continues to rise: he wins a Pulitzer for Collected Poems in 1931 and will win a second for A Further Range, published in 1936, and he is in constant demand as a public speaker at colleges, writers’ workshops, symposia, and dinners. Frost was not just a poet but a poet-teacher; as such, he was instrumental in defining the public functions of poetry in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Frost lived a life of paradox, as personal tragedy and the tumults of politics interwove with his unprecedented achievements. Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary and detailed chronology, these letters illuminate a triumphant and difficult period in the life of a towering literary figure.
Will surely rank as one of the foremost literary biographies of our time.' John Carey, Sunday Times In his lifetime Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) published just a single poem - only a few close friends were aware he wrote. Much of his work was burnt by fellow Jesuits on his death. And yet Hopkins is today a huge figure in English literature. Homosexual but terribly repressed, he channeled his emotions toward nature and God, with profound results. Princeton emeritus professor Martin, the only biographer to have unrestricted use of Hopkins' private papers, tells this extraordinary story from Hopkins' early life and studies at Oxford, through his tortuous conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, to his struggle in later years to retain his very sanity. 'In Martin, the unhappy and tormented genius has found the most sympathetic and intelligent interpreter... [The book] goes to the heart of Hopkins, and plants him firmly before us as a Victorian, and a great one.' Allan Massie, Sunday Telegraph 'Martin follows Hopkins through his toils with sympathy and a great unshowy command of the facts. In this magnificently solicitous biography he has re-established the contours of the story definitively and made the homosexual drama integral to the better-known drama of conversion and poetics.' Seamus Heaney, Independent on Sunday 'The triumph of this learned, scrupulously detailed and persuasive biography is that it brings the reader as near as it is perhaps possible to come to living Hopkins' life, to sensing the mysterious crushing pressures that were for him intimately bound up with the richness and complexity of his writing.' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph
[Edward] FitzGerald (1809-1883) won a small piece of immortality with his translation-adaptation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam... but in every other way he seems to have successfully avoided fulfilment. A godless Epicurean, he lived in permanent virginity, never pressing his homosexual desires beyond a number of sentimental crushes... The son of a fabulously rich heiress, he rarely travelled... Though he had many friends he also had a perverse penchant for alienating them... [Robert Bernard] Martin argues that FitzGerald's greatest achievement, outside the Rubaiyat, is his letters, which certainly have grace and a wistful charm.' Kirkus Review 'There is [] something sad about the life of this loving and never quite satisfied man... Mr. Martin's biography is splendid reading, and it is a real credit to it that he makes us feel the sadness.' New York Times
First published in 1966, Robert Bernard Martin's The Accents of Persuasion is a consummate critical study of Charlotte Brontë's four novels: The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette. 'The bare facts are so literally improbable as to tease one into considering the lives of the Brontes themselves as some wild metaphorical statement of the Romantic conception of the world...Even the best of biography, however, may tend to serve history rather than literature, and one may be forgiven for wishing to return from their lives to the works of the sisters Bronte... The following study, then, is an attempt to search out the themes that occupied [Charlotte] Bronte in her novels and to demonstrate how they are given artistic life; in short, to show how Charlotte Brontë attempted to speak 'the language of conviction' in the 'accents of persuasion'.' (Robert Bernard Martin, from his Introduction.)
The persistent high level of unemployment among young people has become an issue of national concern. This study examines nationwide attitudes, practices, and policies of private employers toward hiring youth. A survey was conducted in 1981-82 among a random cross-sample of 535 private employers taken from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Employer Information Report list (EEO-1). The major findings and recommendations were as follows: (1) strategies are needed to facilitate young workers' moving into long-term, higher-paying occupations; (2) private industry should adopt more flexible guidelines to increase teenagers' securing full-time, entry-level positions; (3) advancement opportunities for young workers must increase, especially in service firms and medium-sized and large businesses; (4) most employers surveyed believe that young people perform as well as adults in most areas; (5) the number of private industry-initiated job programs for minority youth should increase; (6) employers need to be made more aware of government programs designed to increase employment opportunities for youth; (7) studies should be done to find out why nearly half of the employers surveyed do not think that a subminimum wage differential will increase young people's job opportunities; (8) employers' willingness to hire minority youths is based on their commitment to helping disadvantaged young people more than on the level of wage subsidy offered; (9) and teaching basic skills in school and skills training on the job must be emphasized to increase youth employability. A description of the EEO-1 list, the sampling plan, the questionnaire, 17 tables, and a 37-item bibliography are appended. (CJS)
The common perception of Britain's Victorian era as one of strict and strait-laced conformity has long been subject to rebuttal, and Robert Bernard Martin's Enter Rumour (1962) was an early and distinguished endeavour in this line. Herein Martin weighs the evidence of four scandalous incidents that aroused great public interest during the first dozen years of Victoria's reign, each of them emanating from 'what the Victorians might have called the higher orders of society.' Martin recounts the sorry tale of Lady Flora Hastings, victim of Court gossip; Lord Eglinton, who tried and failed to revive the medieval tournament; the strange case of the St Cross Hospital Charity; and George Hudson, 'Railway King', whose rise and fall remains a story for our times. Martin examines sources expertly and further explores how three of these scandals were transformed into fiction - by none less than Dickens, Disraeli and Trollope.
In 1987 a project was undertaken to assess the status of African Americans in the United States in the topical areas to be addressed by the National Research Council's Study Committee on the Status of Black Americans: education, employment, income and occupations, political participation and the administration of justice, social and cultural change, health status and medical care, and the family. Six volumes resulted from the study. Volume I presents essays on the overall status of African Americans in the United States. The following are included: (1) "Stratification and Subordination: Change and Continuity" (E. Yvonne Moss and Wornie L. Reed); (2) "Race and Inequality in the Managerial Age" (William Darity, Jr.); (3) "Research on African-American Families: A Holistic Perspective" (Robert B. Hill); (4) "Black Political Participation" (E. Yvonne Moss); (5) "Blacks: A Valuable National Pool of Talent" (Charles V. Willie); (6) "African-Americans and the Administration of Justice" (E. Yvonne Moss); and (7) "Health and Medical Care" (Wornie L. Reed and Carolyne W. Arnold). An appendix lists project study group members and contributors. Each chapter contains references. (SLD)
William Monroe Trotter Institute University of Massachusetts
Published Date
ISBN 10
1878358049
ISBN 13
9781878358042
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