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This Day in History
Feb 9
Literary
Alice Walker is born, 1944
On this day in 1944, Alice Walker is born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children born to sharecroppers. In their poor, rural community,…
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Beat movement
American social and literary movement originating in the 1950s and centred in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco's North Beach, Los Angeles' Venice West, and New York City's Greenwich Village.
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Allen Ginsberg
(born June 3, 1926, Newark, N.J., U.S.—died April 5, 1997, New York, N.Y.) American poet whose epic poem Howl (1956) is considered to be one of the most significant products of the Beat movement.
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Harlem Renaissance
Spanning the 1920s to the mid-1930s, this literary, artistic and intellectual movement kindled a new black cultural identity.
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(born March 24, 1919, Yonkers, N.Y., U.S.) American poet, one of the founders of the Beat movement in San Francisco in the mid-1950s. His City Lights bookshop was an early gathering place of the Beats, and the publishing arm of City Lights was the first to print the Beats' books of poetry.
(Born July 22, 1849, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Nov. 19, 1887, New York City) American poet and essayist best known for her sonnet The New Colossus, written to the Statue of Liberty.
Born into a cultured family of Sephardic (Spanish Jewish) stock, Lazarus learned languages and the classics at an early age. She early displayed a talent for poetry, and her first book, Poems and Translations (1867), was praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson. She dedicated her next book, Admetus and Other Poems (1871), to him. These and subsequent volumes—the prose Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life (1874), a verse tragedy, The Spagnoletto (1876), and a fine translation of the Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine (1881)—were cosmopolitan in flavour, sometimes technically excellent, but lacking in real distinction.
About 1881, with the wave of immigration to the United States from European and Russian ghettoes, Lazarus took up the defense of persecuted Jews and of Judaism and began to work for the relief of immigrants. She published numerous essays in the Century and the weekly American Hebrew on the pogroms and persecutions and the often equivocal attitude of the Christian West. She was an early advocate of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1882 she produced Songs of a Semite, which included such powerful pieces as The Dance to Death, The Banner of the Jew, and The Crowing of the Red Cock. Her sonnet The New Colossus was chosen to be inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, the monument it celebrates, and it remains a most moving and eloquent expression of an American ideal: “Give me your tired, your poor,” the sonnet concludes, “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Lazarus's last book, a series of prose poems published under the title By the Waters of Babylon, appeared in 1887.
Copyright © 1994-2011 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. For more information visit Britannica.com.
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