Posted in English Literature, Poetry on Jul 9th, 2008 No Comments »
This ballad, titled “The Chapter on Pockets,” focuses on an essential item that many of us probably take for granted - the portable, convenient, and discreet pocket.
Crudely printed, rife with spelling errors, and displaying a woodcut of a young woman walking in the countryside, the ballad references such disparate figures as Eve and Lawrence Sterne’s […]
Posted in American literature, Poetry on Jun 13th, 2008 No Comments »
This broadside, printed with Jack Kerouac’s poem “A Pun for Al Gelpi,” was printed on a handpress here at Harvard by The Lowell-Adams House Printers in 1966. The poem, addressed to Lowell House resident tutor Al Gelpi, refers to a shared joke between Kerouac and Gelpi, explained in this negative print of the poem’s […]
Posted in German language and literature, English Literature, Poetry on May 20th, 2008 No Comments »
In an 1820 letter to his son, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stated that English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was hard at work translating Goethe’s closet drama Faust. Coleridge and his friends, however, openly expressed dislike for the German poet, and in 1834, Coleridge wrote, “I need not tell you that I never put […]
Posted in Manuscripts, American literature, Poetry on May 7th, 2008 1 Comment »
“The Wind begun to rock the Grass,” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is one of the most textually interesting in her corpus. She revised it over a period of nearly twenty years, and five versions survive: four in autograph, and one transcript of a lost autograph original. That “lost” original has now been recovered, […]
Posted in Manuscripts, English Literature, Poetry on May 1st, 2008 No Comments »
Alfred Tennyson first published his poem “Sea Dreams. An Idyll” in Macmillan’s Magazine in its January 1860 issue (for which he was paid between £250 and £300, an enormous sum for a single poem). We recently acquired the page proofs for this printing of the poem, with numerous manuscript annotations by Tennyson. […]
Posted in Russian language and literature, Poetry on Apr 22nd, 2008 No Comments »
Mikhail Gerasimov (1889-1939) was one of the most popular Russian writers of the early twentieth century. A member of the working class, Gerasimov joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1907, and published work extensively in Bolshevik journals. (He became disillusioned with the Party and left it in 1921.) He was also a […]
Posted in German language and literature, Poetry on Mar 27th, 2008 1 Comment »
Benedict von Wagemann (1763-1835?), a physician in Ehingen, Germany, published Die konstitutionelle Monarchie der Thiere in 1823. The work describes, in […]