Noam Chomsky is a pretty unlikely celebrity. As a preeminent anarchist theorist, his political writing is full of passionate intensity, but in his numerous public appearances, he conforms much more to images associated with his day job as a preeminent academic and linguist. He’s very soft-spoken—I’ve never heard him raise his voice above the register of polite coffee-shop conversation—and frumpy in that elder scholar kind of way: uncombed gray hair, an endless supply of sweaters and corduroy jackets…
So, yes, it’s amusing when, in the short clip above, a young Chomsky fan asks the 85-year-old “father of modern linguistics” for advice on how to talk to women. Chomsky’s nonplussed response is honest and heartfelt. He has nothing to offer in this regard, he says: “I got out of that business 70 years ago.” If it seems like Chomsky’s math is a little off—he was married in 1949—consider that he and his wife Carol met when they were both just five years old.
Theirs was a quietly charming romance. Chomsky, who has always possessed an extraordinary ability to keep his personal, political, and professional lives separate, did not speak much of their marriage until after Carol’s death in 2008. In the excerpt above from a Big Think interview shortly after, Chomsky tells a story of group of peasants in Southern Columbia who planted a forest in his wife’s memory. He’s also asked to define love. This time, he has a much more interesting response than his reply to the would-be pick up artist above: “I just know it’s—has an unbreakable grip, but I can’t tell you what it is. It’s just life’s empty without it.”
Ezra Pound was a key figure in 20th century poetry. Not only did he demonstrate impressive poetic skill in his Cantos; he also proved to be a crucial early supporter of several famous contemporaries, championing the likes of Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and H.D.. Before deservedly being condemned for his fascist politics and antisemitism, Pound established himself as one of the leading literary critics of his time. David Perkins, in A History of Modern Poetry, wrote, “During a crucial decade in the history of modern literature, approximately 1912–1922, Pound was the most influential and in some ways the best critic of poetry in England or America.”
Early in the 20th century, Pound helped found the Imagist poetry movement, which abided by three key laws:
1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
In 1913, Pound wrote an essay entitled “A Few Don’ts.” Its rules, enumerated below, provide young poets with a much-needed reminder to reign in their egos and apply themselves assiduously to their craft.
In a nutshell, the rules state that each verse should be lean and purposeful, with no frills or filler to provide padding. They also emphasize the importance of possessing an awareness of the work of previous poets, and of using this understanding in the creation of new work.
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace’. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.
What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow. Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Don’t allow ‘influence’ to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of ‘dove-grey’ hills, or else it was ‘pearl-pale’, I can not remember.
Use either no ornament or good ornament.
Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language, so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g. Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare — if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.
It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.
Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them.
Don’t imagine that a thing will ‘go’ in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose.
Don’t be ‘viewy’ — leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it.
When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.
Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap. The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are ‘all over the shop’. Is it any wonder ‘the public is indifferent to poetry?’
Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause. In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.
Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that, at the start, you will he able to get a rhythm-structure strong enough to affect them very much, though you may fall a victim to all sorts of false stopping due to line ends, and caesurae.
The Musician can rely on pitch and the volume of the orchestra. You can not. The term harmony is misapplied in poetry; it refers to simultaneous sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base.
A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure, it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all.
That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the original.
Consider the definiteness of Dante’s presentation, as compared with Milton’s rhetoric. Read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem too unutterably dull. If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon, Heine when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid; or, if you have not the tongues, seek out the leisurely Chaucer. Good prose will do you no harm, and there is good discipline to be had by trying to write it.
Translation is likewise good training, if you find that your original matter ‘wobbles’ when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated can not ‘wobble’.
If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.
Don’t mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another. This is usually only the result of being too lazy to find the exact word. To this clause there are possibly exceptions.
In March of 1992, many years after photographer Dorothea Lange’s 1936 image of a migrant mother in California (above) became one of the most iconic images from the Great Depression, a camera crew sat down with two daughters of the subject of Lange’s photo. For about 40 minutes, Norma Rydlewski and Katherine McIntosh shared their stories with Blackside, Inc., a company founded by award-winning filmmaker Henry Hampton. In the footage and transcript of that conversation, accessible for the first time along with many more such interviews through Washington University Libraries, the family’s daily challenges come to life. The sisters describe not only their strong, beautiful mother but everything from field work and playing with dirt clods as children to early union meetings and the economical “saving grace” that was World War II.
When The Great Depression, Blackside’s seven-part documentary series, debuted on PBS in October of 1993, the program wove together short segments from extensive interviews with 148 people who experienced the Great Depression, including Rydlewski and McIntosh. As illuminating as the documentary is in its own right, the many additional hours of oral history that Blackside recorded in the process of creating it are a treasure trove of primary source material—all of it now viewable, browsable, and searchable online through the efforts of WU Libraries’ Visual Media Research Lab and Digital Library Services (DLS).
The diverse range of individuals whose reflections on the 1930s are now easily accessible include a grandson of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, celebrated authors Maya Angelou and Gore Vidal, longtime New York Times political reporter Warren Moscow, actors Karen Morley and Ossie Davis, Morton Newman, who worked on the Upton Sinclair campaign for governor in California, and many more from all walks of life. The multicultural, multiregional approach brings needed depth and color to an era that is often remembered and depicted as a monolithic event dragging the nation down for a decade, says Special Collections assistant Alison Carrick, who managed the workflow of the digitization project.
“When we think about the Great Depression, images of the dust bowl and breadlines immediately come to mind,” Carrick says. “And that is part of the history Blackside covered with this series, but they also revealed complex and lively stories that are often overlooked—from union struggles, to heated political campaigns, Works Progress Administration projects, the New Deal, and more. What Blackside managed to do with this series and these interviews was to bring that period of history back to life in a vivid, engaging way.”
The intent behind The Great Depression Interviews project is to provide a seamless, powerful tool with much potential for interdisciplinary research.
“One of the best features of the site, thanks to DLS, is that it is text/keyword searchable,” Carrick says. “This creates a way for users to pinpoint a subject, name, or event and quickly look to see where it occurs in each transcript. Our hope is that this feature will lead users to other transcripts they might not have thought contained similar subject matter.”
I receive weekly reminders of my linguistic ignorance whenever I read anything by authors fluent in Latin. How could I not, whenever Clive James starts to pontificate on the greatness of, say, Tacitus?
“For students acquiring Latin in adult life, the language is most easily approached through those historians who really wrote chronicles — Cornelius Nepos, Sallust, Suetonius and Livy — but with the Histories of Tacitus you get the best reason for approaching it at all… What Sainte-Beuve said of Montaigne — that his prose is like one continuous epigram — is even more true of Tacitus.”
Fantastic! So, which translation should I read?
“There are innumerable translations but the original gives you [Tacitus]’ unrivalled powers of compression.”
As with Latin classics, so with other Indo-European language texts, including Beowulf, originally in Old English, Homer’s Iliadand Odyssey, in Classical Greek, and the ancient Vedic hymns of the Rigveda, in Sanskrit.
For those willing to take up the challenge of reading these canonic texts in their original form, the University of Texas’ Linguistics Research Center provides an excellent resource. In addition to hosting a multitude of Indo-European volumes in their entirety, the LRC has made 10-lesson crash courses, developed by several UT-Austin academics. Lessons include a brief guide to the alphabet, background knowledge on the language’s development, and a grammar guide, all available for the following languages:
Best of all, lessons are based on seminal texts from each language: Latin lessons rely on Tacitus’ Germania, Livy’s History of Rome, and Virgil’s Aeneid, while Homer, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and Plato’s Republic feature prominently in the Classical Greek classes. Students progress through each lesson by reading the original passages, and using the provided guides to translate them to English.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
“And what becomes of all the little boys who never comb their hair? They’re lined up all around the block, on the Nickel over there.” So sings Tom Waits on 1980’s “On the Nickel,” which he originally composed for Ralph Waite’s eponymous feature film, a story of shame, degradation, and good times in the sketchiest part of downtown Los Angeles, through which runs 5th Street — the “Nickel” of the title. That part of town has managed an astonishing cleanup since 1980 (then again, most parts of town have, including the once-seething corner referenced by Heartattack and Vine, the title of Waits’ album from that year) to the point that you’ll now find, just off 5th, the new-wave retro, hipster-friendly Nickel Diner: a favorite eatery of mine, incidentally, but hardly one describable with Waits’ signature rasp, a forcefully resigned instrument tuned to evoke the classically, near-mythologically ragged American life.
Still, you can find the old Nickel on The Tom Waits Map, which marks out all the lyrically identifiable places in Waits’ America, from Minneapolis’ 9th Street (“Hey Charlie, I’m pregnant and living on the 9th street,” goes “Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis”) to the state of Idaho (“Danny says we gotta go, gotta go to Idaho, but we can’t go surfing ’cause it’s 20 below,” on “Danny Says”).
We may think of Waits’ artistic persona as a certain lower slice of America made song, but this map, when zoomed out to a global level, reveals references to many exotic lands, as when he sings about “a Hong Kong drizzle on Cuban heels,” from the perspective of a character who “drank with all the Chinamen, walked the sewers of Paris” and of “Radion the human torso, deep from the jungles of Africa.”
The Tom Waits map itself, in fact, comes from an obviously die-hard Swedish fan by the name of Jonas Nordström. As he and the rest of the Waits faithful know, the man doesn’t just speak to an askew sensibility in America; he speaks to askew sensibilities all throughout humanity.
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Think about the actors and directors who stood as pillars of the 1990s “indiewood” movement, and the distinctive images of Quentin Tarantino and Steve Buscemi will surely cross your mind. Both delivered much of interest in that cinematically fruitful decade. Buscemi, whom Roger Ebert deemed “the house act of American independent films,” played highly memorable roles in movies like Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup, Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion, and the Coen brothers’ Fargo and The Big Lebowski. Tarantino directed three features that need no introduction, the first of which, 1991’s Reservoir Dogs, brought them together. In the clip above, you can watch Tarantino and Buscemi’s videotaped rehearsal sessions, wherein, among other things, they work out their respective characters, the would-be diamond thieves Mr. Brown and Mr. Pink.
Before Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino had attempted only the incomplete My Best Friend’s Birthday. Before shooting what would become his first finished movie for real, he put together mock-ups of these scenes at the Sundance Institute Director’s Workshop and Lab, which then subjected them to frank evaluations from a rotating panel of veteran filmmakers. As much as we enjoy his acting, let’s not forget his own contributions as a director; his 1996 debut Trees Lounge, in which he also stars, easily ranks among the finest products of that era’s independent cinema. And as for Tarantino’s own subsequent forays into acting… well, nobody can argue that they don’t entertain.
Pink Floyd had to find its way again after founding singer Syd Barrett had a mental breakdown and left the band in 1968. The new group became introspective, exploring a range of effects and soundscapes that increasingly trended toward (or invented) New Age music. For example the opening instrumental, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 1)” from 1975’s Wish You Were Here sounds for all the world like Vangelis. At this point in their career, the band seemed like it would be perfectly at home scoring sci-fi films, which—given the golden age of far out space-glam futurism that was the 1970s—I consider a wonderful thing. What this also means however, is that Wish You Were Here is an album short on songs, featuring only five properly listed, though the first and last tracks are over ten minute long rock operettas.
Musically, it’s a tremendously accomplished piece of work, lush and expansive but curiously restrained. The centerpiece, “Have a Cigar”— surely a precursor of bitter showbiz rant disguised as double concept album, The Wall—is in fact sung by a ringer, Roy Harper. (The only other time the band featured a guest vocalist was on the soaring, wordless “Great Gig in the Sky” from the previous album, Dark Side of the Moon.) Though the collaboration was a fluke—Harper simply happened to be recording in the next studio over—his presence seems essential in hindsight. The band were big fans of Harper’s, an eccentric folk singer who has released 22 albums to date. It’s easy to see why. He’s like a psychedelic British Neil Young, an artist whom, I would argue, sometimes has a lot in common with Pink Floyd, such as a willingness to release albums almost fully composed of extended jams.
Wish You Were Here was written around the song “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” an extended jam broken into two extended sequences that bookend the album. The song is about their tragically befuddled former singer, and the album has some of the saddest lyrics in the band’s oeuvre, which I suppose says quite a lot (I attended many an adolescent party where someone—yes, sometimes that someone was me—picked up the acoustic guitar and led a maudlin singalong of the title track.) Fans of the band will need no further persuading to watch the above documentary about the making of Wish You Were Here, but if my touting doesn’t sway you, consider it then a rare opportunity to see some of the most talented musicians of the twentieth century at work, shining even into their very English older years (though rarely in the same room), with a dignity and dedication that is difficult to find in modern pop music. I say this with full awareness of how cranky it may sound, but so be it. They don’t make bands like this anymore.
People do still occasionally make records like Pink Floyd’s, especially like 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon—which more or less perfected the sound of space rock—but no one has ever made one so perfectly realized. And yet if asked to choose between that album and Wish You Were Here, I could not do it. They are far too different in their approaches. In the Making of Dark Side of the Moon documentary, Roger Waters characteristically says that Dark Side was made at a time when the band “still had a common goal—that is to become rich and famous.” And for all its acid satire of wealth and fame and its often morbid themes, it’s the sound of a band full of youthful self-confidence and ambition, where the follow-up’s orchestral pieces speak of deeper and sadder realms.
The songs on Dark Side of the Moon were partly finished live as the band debuted experimental versions of the songs in a 1972 tour, and the album’s success the following year saw the band realize their dreams. Pink Floyd became a stadium act overnight. One can imagine the toll the Dark Side of the Moon touring took on the band, who—despite their renown for stage spectacles—have always seemed like very retiring individuals, except for the frequently grandiose Waters.
Waters has taken a lot of flack for his part in the longstanding animosity between himself and co-leader, guitarist David Gilmour, but seeing him mastermind Dark Side of the Moon—through retrospective interviews mainly—reminds us of what an enormous talent he had. Speaking of retiring personalities, Waters, for a time the band’s primary lyricist, penned the unforgettable line, “hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” from “Time”—a line cribbed from Thoreau but that could have been written by Evelyn Waugh or Somerset Maugham, says guitarist Nigel Williamson. It’s a “description of the English character,” says Williamson, that “permeate[s] the whole record, and indeed the whole of Pink Floyd’s career.”
H/T and thanks goes to @BrainPicker for sending the top film our way.
Jonny Wilson, otherwise known as Eclectic Method, has made an art of “splicing together music, TV and film and setting it to high-energy dance beats.” He has also become something of a digital curator of pop culture. In the video above, Wilson presents:
A video remix journey through the history of sampling taking in some of the most noted breaks and riffs of the decades. A chronological journey from the Beatles’ use of the Mellotron in the 60s to the sample dense hiphop and dance music of the 80s and 90s. Each break is represented by a vibrating vinyl soundwave exploding into various tracks that sampled it, each re-use another chapter in the modern narrative.
The audio track can be downloaded over at SoundCloud. If you dig this brief bit of musical history, you won’t want to miss some of the related items below.
Reddit’sAsk Me Anything (AMA) series, where users get the chance to pose questions to the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen King, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, provides a surprisingly simple way to interact with celebrities. Before Reddit’s arrival in 2005, however, real-time exchanges between your garden-variety Internet user and famous personalities were occasionally conducted in Internet chatrooms. One such early case appears to be a chat between the readers of WORD Magazine and David Foster Wallace (read 30 of his essays free online), which seems to have taken place in May of 1996.
If AMAs are an orderly, if vast, Q & A session, this chat is more like a boozy group meeting with your favorite English lit professor in a smoky bar. (Read the transcript here.) Wallace, using the handle “dfw,” is on a refreshingly level field with the other chat participants, and the conversation naturally drifts from one topic to another. Things, as they often do, begin with a bit of banter:
dfw: I’ve had some unpleasant nicknaames and monikers in my time, but nobody’s ever hung “fosty” on me before.
Keats: You know, I still think it should be spelled Fostie, or Fostey.
Keats: Fosty looks too much like “Frosty” and “sty” to me.
Keats: And makes me think of eyeballs packed in ice.
dfw: “Sty” as in an impacted eyelash or a pigpen, you mean?
Keats: Yeah. Is that what a sty as in “sty in your eye” is?
Marisa: I used to think the word “sty” was pronounced “stee”.
Keats: I had no idea exactly, just an unpleasant feeling about it.
dfw: Yes. Massively painful and embarrassing, too. Like a carbuncle on the exact tip of your nose — that sort of thing.
Keats: I used to think the word “trough” was pronounced “troff.”
Keats: You know, I happen to have a carbuncle on the tip of my nose right now.
Keats: Except it’s not a carbuncle, it’s more like a welt. It’s still embarrassing.
dfw: In my very first seminar in college, I pronounced facade “fakade.” The memory’s still fresh and raw.
Soon, things take a turn for the serious, and readers begin to ask Wallace about irony:
dfw: I don’t think irony’s meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.
Marisa: Why are people afraid to be seen as naive and sentimental?
dfw: Marisa: I think that’s a very deep, very hard question. One answer is that commercial comedy’s often set up to feature an ironist making devastating sport of someone who’s naive or sentimental or pretentious or pompous.
Keats: I’m starting to see a lot of irony in Hollywood and in advertising, but its function seems to be to let them talk out of both sides of their mouths.
dfw: Keats: advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it implicitly congratulates both itself and the viewer (for making the joke and getting the joke, respectively).
Wallace also drops a few mentions of some of his favorite authors:
DaleK: Mr. Wallace, I’m curious…who among current novelists do you find the most interesting?
dfw: Dalek — DeLillo, Ozick, R. Powers, AM Homes, Denis Johnson, David Markson, (old) JA Phillips and Louise Erdrich.
While we can’t conclusively confirm that this was indeed the real DFW conducting the chat, it’s hard to deny that “dfw” sounds very much like the author. Certainly, the complete exchange is as much fun to read for its mid-90s internet chatroom nostalgia as it is for Wallace’s thoughts on irony, Infinite Jest, and the sound of one hand clapping. The whole transcript is available here.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
Like nearly all folk songs, “We Shall Overcome” has a convoluted, obscure history that traces back to no single source. The Library of Congress locates the song’s origins in “African American hymns from the early 20th century” and an article on About.com dates the melody to an antebellum song called “No More Auction Block for Me” and the lyrics to a turn-of-the-century hymn written by the Reverend Charles Tindley of Philadelphia. The original lyric was one of personal salvation—“I’ll Overcome Someday”—but at least by 1945, when the song was taken up by striking tobacco workers in Charleston, S.C., it was transmuted into a statement of solidarity as “We Will Overcome.” Needless to say, in its final form, “We Shall Overcome” became the unofficial anthem of the labor and Civil Rights movements and eventually came to be sung “in North Korea, in Beirut, Tiananmen Square and in South Africa’s Soweto Township.”
Pete Seeger—who passed away yesterday at the age of 94—has long been credited with the dissemination of “We Shall Overcome,” but he was always quick to cite his sources. Seeger heard the song in 1947 from folklorist Zilphia Horton, music director at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk Center who, Seeger said, “had a beautiful alto voice and sang it with no rhythm.” As he told NPR recently, his touches were also those of other singers:
I gave it kind of ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump. It was medium slow as I sang it, but the banjo kept a steady rhythm going. I remember teaching it to a gang in Carnegie Hall that year, and the following year I put it in a little music magazine called People’s Songs. Over the years, I remember singing it two different ways. I’m usually credited with changing [‘Will’] to ‘Shall,’ but there was a black woman who taught at Highlander Center, a wonderful person named Septima Clark. And she always liked shall, too, I’m told.
According to Seeger in the interview above—conducted by Josh Baron before a 2010 performance—the person most responsible for “making it the number one song back in those days” was the Music Director of the Highlander Folk Center, Guy Carawan, who “sent messages to the civil rights movement all through the South from Texas to Florida to Maryland.” Carawan “introduced this song with a new rhythm that I had never heard before.” Seeger goes on to describe the rhythm in detail, then says “it was the hit song of the weekend in February 1960…. It was not a song, it was the song all across the South. I’ve found out since then that the song started off as a union song in the 19th century.”
In this particular interview, Seeger takes full credit for changing the “will” to “shall.” Although it was “the only record [he] made which sold,” he didn’t seek to cash in on his changes (Seeger shared the copyright with Zilphia Horton, Carawan, and Frank Hamilton). As you can easily see from the numerous eulogies and tributes popping up all over (or a quick scan of the “Pete Seeger Appreciation Page”), Seeger deserves to be remembered for much more than his sixties folk singing, but he perhaps did more than anyone to make “We Shall Overcome” a song sung by a nation. And as he tells it, it was song he hoped would resonate worldwide:
I was singing for some young Lutheran church people in Sundance, Idaho, and there were some older people who were mistrustful of my lefty politics. They said: ‘Who are you intending to overcome?’ I said: ‘Well, in Selma, Alabama they’re probably thinking of Chief Pritchett.; they will overcome. And I am sure Dr. King is thinking of the system of segregation across the whole country, not just the South. For me, it means the entire world. We’ll overcome our tendencies to solve our problems with killing and learn to work together to bring this world together.
I have little desire to rehash the politics, but the facts are plain: by the time I arrived in college as an undergraduate English major in the mid-90s, the idea of the “Western Canon” as a container of—in the words of a famous hymn—“all that’s good, and great, and true” was seriously on the wane, to put it mildly. And in many quarters of academia, mention of the name of Yale literary critic Harold Bloom provoked, at the very least, a raised eyebrow and pointed silence. Bloom’s reputation perhaps unfairly fell victim to the so-called “Canon Wars,” likely at times because of a misidentification with political philosopher Allan Bloom. That Bloom was himself no ideologue, writes Jim Sleeper; he was a close friend of Saul Bellow and “an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life.” Nonetheless, his fiery attack on changing academic values, The Closing of the American Mind, became a textbook of the neoconservative right.
Though Harold Bloom wished to distance himself from culture war polemics, he has unapologetically practiced what Allan Bloom preached, teaching the Canonical “great books” of literature and religion and opposing all manner of critics on the left, whom he lumps together in the phrase “the School of Resentment.” Bloom’s 1973 The Anxiety of Influence has itself exerted a major influence on literary studies, and best-selling popular works, like 1998’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, have kept Harold Bloom’s name in circulation even when scholarly citations of his work declined. In 1994, Bloom re-affirmed his commitment to the Canon with The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, a fierce sortie against his so-called “School of Resentment” adversaries and a work University of Minnesota professor Norman Fruman called a “heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities.” (Hear Bloom discuss the book with Eleanor Wachtel in a 1995 CBC interview.)
The Western Canon is tightly focused on only 26 authors, but in a series of four appendices, Bloom lists the hundreds of other names he considers canonical. For all of Bloom’s ornery defensiveness, his list is surprisingly inclusive, as well as—for Fruman—surprisingly idiosyncratic. (Bloom later disavowed the list, claiming that his editor insisted on it.) Like a classical philologist, Bloom divides his Canon into four “ages” or periods: The Theocratic Age (2000 BCE-1321 CE); The Aristocratic Age (1321–1832); The Democratic Age: 1832–1900); and The Chaotic Age (20th Century). You can view the complete list here. Below, we’ve compiled a very partial, but still sizable, excerpt of texts from Bloom’s list that are available online through the University of Adelaide’s ebook library. For all of the unpopular positions he has taken over the past few decades, Bloom’s immense erudition, expansive intellect, and sincere commitment to the humanities have never been in question. As a distinguished exemplar of a fading tradition, he is an invaluable resource for students and lovers of literature.
A: “The Theocratic Age”
The Ancient Greeks
Homer (ca.800BC)
Iliad; Odyssey.
Hesiod (ca.700BC)
Works and Days; Theogony.
Sappho (ca.600BC)
Aeschylus (525 BC — 456 BC)
Oresteia; Seven Against Thebes; Prometheus Bound; Persians; Suppliant Women.
Sophocles (c. 496‑c. 405 BC)
Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone; Electra; Ajax; Women of Trachis; Philoctetes.
The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata; The Knights; The Wasps; The Assemblywomen.
Herodotus, 485–420BCE
The Histories.
Thucydides, ca.460 BCE
The Peloponnesian Wars.
Plato, c.427‑c.347 BCE
Dialogues.
Aristotle, 384–322 BCE
Poetics; Ethics.
Hellenistic Greeks
Menander, ca. 342–291 BC
The Girl from Samos.
Plutarch, 46–120
Lives; Moralia.
Aesop (620 — 560 BC)
Fables.
Petronius, c.27–66
The Romans
Terence, 195/185–159 BC
The Girl from Andros; The Eunuch; The Mother-in-Law.
Lucretius, 98?–55 BCE
The Way Things Are.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106–43 BCE
On the Gods.
Horace, 65–8 BCE
Odes; Epistles; Satires.
Catullus (c.84 B.C. — c.54 B.C.)
Attis and Other Poems.
Virgil (70–19 BC)
Aeneid; Eclogues; Georgics.
Ovid (43 BC — 17 AD)
Metamorphoses; The Art of Love; Heroides.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ca.4 BCE–65 CE
Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens.
Petronius, c.27–66
Satyricon.
Apuleius, c. 123/125‑c. 180
The Golden Ass.
The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante
Augustine of Hippo, 354–430
City of God; Confessions.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, 1170–1220
Parzival.
Chrétien de Troyes, 12th cent
Yvain: The Knight of the Lion.
Beowulf (ca.800)
B: “The Aristocratic Age”
Italy
Dante (1265 — 1321)
The Divine Comedy; The New Life.
Petrarch, 1304–1374
Lyric Poems; Selections.
Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313–1375
The Decameron.
Matteo Maria Boiardo, 1440 or 41–1494.
Orlando Innamorato.
Lodovico Ariosto, 1474–1533
Orlando Furioso.
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527
The Prince; The Mandrake, a Comedy.
Benvenuto Cellini, 1500–1571
Autobiography.
Tommaso Campanella, 1568–1639
Poems; The City of the Sun.
Spain
Miguel de Cervantes, 1547–1616
Don Quixote; Exemplary Stories.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca, 1600–1681
Life is a Dream; The Mayor of Zalamea; The Mighty Magician; The Doctor of His Own Honor.
England and Scotland
Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca.1343–1400)
The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde.
Thomas Malory, 1430–1471
Le Morte D’Arthur.
Thomas More, 1478–1535
Utopia.
Philip Sidney, 1554–1586.
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; Astrophel and Stella; An Apology for Poetry.
Edmund Spenser, 1552–1599
The Faerie Queene; The Minor Poems.
Christopher Marlowe, 1564–1593
Poems and Plays.
Thomas Nashe, 1567–1601
The Unfortunate Traveller.
William Shakespeare, 1564–1616
Plays and Poems.
John Donne, 1572–1631
Poems; Sermons.
Ben Jonson, 1573–1637
Poems, Plays, and Masques.
Francis Bacon, 1561–1626
Essays.
Robert Burton, 1577–1640
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Thomas Browne, 1605–1682
Religio Medici; Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall; The Garden of Cyrus.
Thomas Hobbes, 1588–1679
Leviathan.
Herrick, Robert, 1591–1674
Poems.
Andrew Marvell, 1621–1678
Poems.
John Ford, 1586-ca.1640
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
John Webster, c.1580‑c.1634
The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi.
Izaak Walton, 1593–1683
The Compleat Angler.
John Milton, 1608–1674
Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained; Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems; Samson Agonistes; Areopagitica.
John Aubrey, 1626–1697
Brief Lives.
Samuel Butler, 1612–1680
Hudibras.
John Dryden, 1631–1700
Poetry and Plays; Critical Essays.
Jonathan Swift, 1667–1745
A Tale of a Tub; Gulliver’s Travels; Shorter Prose Works; Poems.
Alexander Pope, 1688–1744
Poems.
John Gay, 1685–1732
The Beggar’s Opera.
James Boswell, 1740–1795
Life of Johnson; Journals.
Samuel Johnson, 1709–1784
Works.
Edward Gibbon, 1737–1794
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Edmund Burke, 1729–1797
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful; Reflections on the Revolution in France
Oliver Goldsmith, 1728–1774
The Vicar of Wakefield; She Stoops to Conquer; The Traveller; The Deserted Village.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751–1816
The School of Scandal; The Rivals.
William Cowper, 1731–1800
Poetical Works.
Defoe, Daniel (1661?-1731)
Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; A Journal of the Plague Year.
Samuel Richardson, 1689–1761.
Clarissa; Pamela; Sir Charles Grandison.
Henry Fielding, 1707–1754
Joseph Andrews; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.
Tobias Smollett, 1721–1771
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; The Adventures of Roderick Random.
Laurence Sterne, 1713–1768
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
Fanny Burney, 1752–1840
Evelina.
France
Michel de Montaigne, 1533–1592
Essays.
Francois Rabelais, 1494?-1553?
Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1549
The Heptameron.
Jean de La Fontaine, 1621–1695
Fables.
Molière, 1622–1673
The Misanthrope; Tartuffe; The School for Wives; The Learned Ladies; Don Juan; School for Husbands; Ridiculous Precieuses; The Would-Be Gentleman; The Miser; The Imaginary Invalid.
Blaise Pascal, 1623–1662
Pensées.
Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 1712–1778
The Confessions; Émile; La Nouvelle Héloïse.
Voltaire, 1694–1778
Zadig; Candide; Letters on England; The Lisbon Earthquake.
Germany
Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1466–1536
In Praise of Folly.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832
Faust, Parts One and Two; Dichtung und Wahrheit; Egmont; Elective Affinities; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Poems; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering; Italian Journey; Verse Plays; Hermann and Dorothea; Roman Elegies; Venetian Epigrams; West-Eastern Divan.
Friedrich Schiller, 1759–1805
The Robbers; Mary Stuart; Wallenstein; Don Carlos; On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature.
C: “The Democratic Age”
Italy
Giovanni Verga, 1840–1922
Little Novels of Sicily; Mastro-Don Gesualdo; The House by the Medlar Tree; The She-Wolf and Other Stories.
France
Victor Hugo, 1802–1885
The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems; Les Misérables; Notre-Dame of Paris; William Shakespeare; The Toilers of the Sea; The End of Satan; God.
Gautier, Théophile, 1811–1872
Mademoiselle de Maupin; Enamels and Cameos.
Balzac, Honoré de, 1799–1850
The Girl with the Golden Eyes; Louis Lambert; The Wild Ass’s Skin; Old Goriot; Cousin Bette; A Harlot High and Low; Eugénie Grandet; Ursule Mirouet.
Stendhal, 1783–1842
On Love; The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma.
Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1880
Madame Bovary; Sentimental Education; Salammbô; A Simple Soul.
George Sand, 1804–1876
The Haunted Pool.
Charles Baudelaire, 1821–1867
Flowers of Evil; Paris Spleen.
Guy de Maupassant, 1850–1893
Selected Short Stories.
Emile Zola, 1840–1902
Germinal; L’Assommoir; Nana.
Scandinavia
Henrik Ibsen, 1828–1906
Brand; Peer Gynt; Emperor and Galilean; Hedda Gabler; The Master Builder; The Lady from the Sea; When We Dead Awaken.
Great Britain
William Blake, 1757–1827
Complete Poetry and Prose.
William Wordsworth, 1770–1850
Poems; The Prelude.
Walter Scott, 1771–1832
Waverley; The Heart of Midlothian; Redgauntlet; Old Mortality.
Jane Austen, 1775–1817
Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Mansfield Park; Persuasion.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772–1834
Poems and Prose.
Hazlitt, William, 1778–1830
Essays and Criticism.
George Byron, 1788–1824
Don Juan; P oems.
Thomas de Quincey, 1785–1859
Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Selected Prose.
Maria Edgeworth, 1767–1849
Castle Rackrent.
Elizabeth Gaskell, 1810–1865
Cranford; Mary Barton; North and South.
Charles Robert Maturin, 1782–1824
Melmoth the Wanderer.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792–1822
Poems; A Defence of Poetry.
Mary Shelley, 1797–1851
Frankenstein.
John Keats, 1795–1821
Poems and Letters.
Robert Browning, 1812–1889
Poems; The Ring and the Book.
Charles Dickens, 1812–1870
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; David Copperfield; The Adventures of Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Bleak House; Hard Times; Nicholas Nickleby; Dombey and Son; Great Expectations; Martin Chuzzlewit; Christmas Stories; Little Dorrit; Our Mutual Friend; The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Alfred Tennyson, 1809–1892
Poems.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828–1882
Poems and Translations.
Matthew Arnold, 1822–1888
Poems; Essays.
Christina Georgina Rossetti, 1830–1894.
Poems.
Thomas Love Peacock, 1785–1866
Nightmare Abbey; Gryll Grange.
Thomas Carlyle, 1795–1881
Selected Prose; Sartor Resartus.
John Ruskin, 1819–1900
Modern Painters; The Stones of Venice; Unto This Last; The Queen of the Air.
John Stuart Mill, 1806–1873
On Liberty; Autobiography.
Anthony Trollope, 1815–1882
The Barsetshire Novels; The Palliser Novels; Orley Farm; The Way We Live Now.
Lewis Carroll, 1832–1898
Complete Works.
George Gissing, 1857–1903
New Grub Street.
Charlotte Bronte, 1816–1855
Jane Eyre; Villette.
Emily Bronte, 1818–1848
Poems; Wuthering Heights.
Anne Bronte, 1820–1849
William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811–1863
Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond.
George Meredith, 1828–1909
Poems; The Egoist.
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874–1936
Collected Poems; The Man Who Was Thursday.
Samuel Butler, 1835–1902
Erewhon; The Way of All Flesh.
Wilkie Collins, 1824–1889
The Moonstone; The Woman in White; No Name.
Thomson, James, 1834–1882
The City of the Dreadful Night.
Oscar Wilde, 1854–1900
Plays; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Artist as Critic; Letters.
George Eliot, 1819–1880
Adam Bede; Silas Marner; The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda.
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850–1894
Essays; Kidnapped; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Treasure Island; The New Arabian Nights; The Master of Ballantrae; Weir of Hermiston.
William Morris, 1834–1896
Early Romances; Poems; The Earthly Paradise; The Well at the World’s End; News from Nowhere.
Bram Stoker, 1847–1912
Dracula.
George MacDonald, 1824–1905
Lilith; At the Back of the North Wind.
Germany
Jakob Grimm, 1785–1863 and Grimm, Wilhelm, 1786–1859
Fairy Tales.
Hoffmann, E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus), 1776–1822
The Devil’s Elixir; Tales.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900
The Birth of Tragedy; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power.
The Complete Tales; Dead Souls; The Government Inspector.
Mikhail Lermontov, 1814–1841
Narrative Poems; A Hero of Our Time.
Ivan Turgenev, 1818–1883
A Sportsman’s Notebook; A Month in the Country; Fathers and Sons; On the Eve; First Love.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1821–1881
Notes from the Underground; Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed (The Devils); The Brothers Karamazov; Short Novels.
Leo Tolstoy, 1828–1910
The Cossacks; War and Peace; Anna Karenina; A Confession; The Power of Darkness; Short Novels.
Anton Chekhov, 1860–1904
The Tales; The Major Plays.
The United States
Washington Irving, 1783–1859
The Sketch Book.
James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851.
The Deerslayers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–1882
Nature; Essays; Representative Men; The Conduct of Life; Journals; Poems.
Emily Dickinson, 1830–1886
Complete Poems.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804–1864
The Scarlet Letter; Tales and Sketches; The Marble Faun; Notebooks.
Herman Melville, 1819–1891
Moby-Dick; The Piazza Tales; Billy Budd; Collected Poems; Clarel.
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849
Poetry and Tales; Essays and Reviews; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Eureka.
Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862
Walden; Poems; Essays.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807–1882
Selected Poems.
Ambrose Bierce, 1842–1913
Collected Writings.
Louisa May Alcott, 1832–1888
Little Women.
Kate Chopin, 1850–1904
The Awakening.
William Dean Howells, 1837–1920
The Rise of Silas Lapham; A Modern Instance.
Henry James, 1843–1916
The Portrait of a Lady; The Bostonians; The Princess Casamassima; The Awkward Age; Short Novels and Tales; The Ambassadors; The Wings of the Dove; The Golden Bowl
Mark Twain, 1835–1910
Complete Short Stories; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Devil’s Racetrack; Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger; Pudd’nhead Wilson; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
William James, 1842–1910
The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism.
D: “The Chaotic Age”
France
Anatole France, 1844–1924
Penguin Island; Thaïs.
Marcel Proust, 1871–1922
Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time).
Albert Camus, 1913–1960
The Stranger; The Plague; The Fall; The Rebel.
Great Britain and Ireland.
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939
The Collected Poems; Collected Plays; A Vision; Mythologies.
George Bernard Shaw, 1856–1950
Major Critical Essays; Heartbreak House; Pygmalion; Saint Joan; Major Barbara; Back to Methuselah.
John Millington Synge, 1871–1909
Collected Plays.
George Douglas Brown, 1869–1902
The House with the Green Shutters.
Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928
The Well-Beloved; The Woodlanders; The Return of the Native; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Far From the Madding Crowd; Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure; Collected Poems.
Rudyard Kipling, 1865–1936
Kim; Collected Stories; Puck of Pook’s Hill; Complete Verse.
Housman, A. E., 1859–1936
Collected Poems.
Joseph Conrad, 1857–1924
Lord Jim; The Secret Agent; Nostromo; Under Western Eyes; Victory.
Ronald Firbank, 1886–1926
Five Novels.
Ford Madox Ford, 1873–1939
Parade’s End; The Good Soldier.
Saki, 1870–1916
The Short Stories.
Wells, H. G., 1866–1946
The Science Fiction Novels.
David Lindsay, 1876–1945
A Voyage to Arcturus.
Arnold Bennett, 1867–1931.
The Old Wives’ Tale.
John Galsworthy, 1867–1933
The Forsyth Saga.
Lawrence, D. H., 1885–1930
Complete Poems; Studies in Classic American Literature; Complete Short Stories; Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow; Women in Love.
Virginia Woolf, 1882–1941
Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando: A Biography; The Waves; Between the Acts.
James Joyce, 1882–1941
Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Finnegans Wake.
George Orwell, 1903–1950
Collected Essays; 1984.
Germany.
Franz Kafka, 1883–1924
Amerika; The Complete Stories; The Blue Octavo Notebook; The Trial; Diaries; The Castle; Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms.
Russia.
Maksim Gorky, 1868–1936
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev; Autobiography.
Scandinavia.
Knut Hamsun, 1859–1952
Hunger; Pan.
Czech.
Karel Čapek, 1890–1938
War with the Newts; R.U.R.
Australia and New Zealand.
Miles Franklin, 1879–1954
My Brilliant Career.
Katherine Mansfield, 1888–1923
The Short Stories.
The United States.
Edith Wharton, 1862–1937
Collected Short Stories; The Age of Innocence; Ethan Frome; The House of Mirth; The Custom of the Country.
Willa Cather, 1873–1947
My Antonia; The Professor’s House; A Lost Lady.
Gertrude Stein, 1874–1946
Three Lives; The Geographical History of America; The Making of Americans; Tender Buttons.
Theodore Dreiser, 1871–1945
Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy.
Sinclair Lewis, 1885–1951
Babbitt; It Can’t Happen Here.
Eugene O’Neill, 1888–1953
Lazarus Laughed; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1896–1940
Babylon Revisited and Other Stories; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night.
Nathanael West, 1903–1940
Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust.
Of this last Appendix–which ends with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and includes a great degree of diversity–Bloom writes: “I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug’s game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical . . . literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind.” Again, the selections above are very limited. Before you ask, “what about x, y, or z!” see Bloom’s full list here. And if you still do not find authors you believe deserve inclusion in any version of the Western Canon, pick up a copy of Bloom’s book to learn more about his critical criteria.
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