Fun_People Archive
15 Aug
LIT BITS V3 #229

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 100 17:56:23 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #229

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #229
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Wednesday, 16 August 2000; on this day,

322 years ago (1678),

     Andrew Marvell, satirist and poet ("To His Coy Mistress"), dies at 57
     in London.

226 years ago (1774),

     Voltaire, writing to Frederick the Great after Lord Chesterfield's
     death, calls him, "The only Englishman who ever argued for the art of
     pleasing as the first duty of life."

80 years ago (1920),

     Violent images and graphic language in poetry and fiction will
     become the trademarks of Charles Bukowski, born today in
     Andernach, Germany. Bukowski will live most of his life in Los
     Angeles, California, and began publishing his unique poetry in
     1955.

51 years ago (1949),

     Margaret Mitchell (_Gone With the Wind_), 48, dies in Atlanta shortly
     after being struck down by a taxi.

2 years ago (1998),

     Dorothy West, the Harlem Renaissance writer who experienced her own
     renaissance in her 80s, dies at age 91. The Boston native began writing
     stories in 1914, at age 7; at age 19 she moved to Harlem to join the
     burgeoning literary and artistic movement led by Langston Hughes, Zora
     Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and many others. The movement faded
     in the early 1930s, as did her fame. Then in 1995 she published _The
     Wedding_, which became a bestseller (and made into a TV miniseries by
     Oprah Winfrey).

Today's poem:

		The Fair Singer

     To make a final conquest of all me,
     Love did compose so sweet an enemy,
     In whom both beauties to my death agree,
     Joining themselves in fatal harmony;
     That while she with her eyes my heart does bind,
     She with her voice might captivate my mind.

     I could have fled from one but singly fair:
     My disentangled soul itself might save,
     Breaking the curled trammels of her hair.
     But how should I avoid to be her slave,
     When subtle art invisibly can wreathe
     My fetters of the very air I breathe?

     It had been easy fighting in some plain,
     Where victory might hang in equal choice,
     But all resistance against her is vain,
     Who has th' advantage both of eyes and voice;
     And all my forces needs must be undone,
     She having gained both the wind and sun.

						Andrew Marvell

© 2000 Peter Langston