USA Poet Vachel Lindsay 1879 - 1931

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (November 10, 1879 – December 5, 1931) was an American poet. He is considered the father of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted. His extensive correspondence with the poet Yeats details his intentions to revive the musical qualities in poetry as had been practiced by the ancient Greeks.

Because of his identity as a performance artist and his use of American Midwest themes, Lindsay became known in the 1910s as the "Prairie Troubador." For the final twenty years of his life, Lindsay was one of the best-known poets in America. His reputation was high enough to enable him to befriend, encourage, and mentor other poets, such as Langston Hughes and Sara Teasdale. However, his poetry lacked elements that encouraged the attention of academic scholarship, and after his death he became an obscure figure.

Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois, where his father — Vachel Thomas Lindsay — worked as a medical doctor and had considerable financial resources. As a result, the Lindsays lived next door to the Illinois Executive Mansion, home of the Governor of Illinois. This location of his childhood home had its influence on Lindsay, and one of his poems, "The Eagle Forgotten", eulogizes Illinois governor John P. Altgeld, whom Lindsay admired for his courage in pardoning the anarchists involved in the Haymarket Affair — despite the strong protests of US President Grover Cleveland.

Growing up in Springfield influenced Lindsay in other ways as well, as evidenced in such poems as "On the Building of Springfield" and culminating in poems praising Springfield's most famous resident, Abraham Lincoln. In "Lincoln", Lindsay exclaims "Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all!" In his 1914 poem "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight (In Springfield, Illinois)", Lindsay specifically places Lincoln 'in' Springfield, with the poem opening:

It is portentous, and a thing of state

That here at midnight, in our little town

A mourning figure walks, and will not rest...

Lindsay studied medicine at Hiram College in Ohio from 1897 to 1900, but he did not want to be a doctor. His parents pressured him toward medicine. One day Vachel wrote home to his parents saying that he wasn't meant to be a doctor and that his true living should be that of a painter. His parents wrote back saying that doctors can draw pictures in their free time. Leaving Hiram, he thought he would become an artist, and went to Chicago to study at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1900 to 1903. In 1904 he left to attend the New York School of Art (now The New School) to study pen and ink. Lindsay remained interested in art for the rest of his life, drawing illustrations for some of his poetry. His art studies also probably led him to appreciate the new art form of silent film, on which he wrote a book in 1915: The Art of the Moving Picture, generally considered the first book of film criticism, according to critic Stanley Kauffmann, discussing Lindsay in For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism.

Beginnings as a poet

Vachel Lindsay in 1912

While in New York in 1905 Lindsay turned to poetry in earnest. He tried to sell his poems on the streets. Self-printing his poems, he began to barter a pamphlet entitled "Rhymes To Be Traded For Bread", which he traded for food as a self-perceived modern version of a medieval troubadour.

From March to May, 1906, Lindsay traveled roughly 600 miles on foot from Jacksonville, Florida to Kentucky, again trading his poetry for food and lodging. From April to May, 1908, Lindsay undertook another poetry-selling trek, walking from New York City to Hiram, Ohio.

From May to September 1912 he traveled — again on foot — from Illinois to New Mexico, trading his poems for food and lodging. During this last trek, Lindsay composed his most famous poem, "The Congo". On his return, Harriet Monroe published in Poetry magazine first his poem "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" in 1913 and then "The Congo" in 1914. At this point, Lindsay became very well known.

Poetry as performance

Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle, Harry the uplands, Steal all the cattle, Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, Bing. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom...

The Congo

Unlike Lindsay’s more purely intellectual contemporaries, the poet declaimed his works from the stage, complete with the extravagant gestures of a carnival barker and old time preacher, from the beginning declaring himself to be a product of what he termed ‘Higher Vaudeville’: “I think that my first poetic impulse is for music; second a definite conception with the ring of the universe…” (Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters 1935, page 62) This is evidenced by the 1931 recording he made just before his suicide, his still-radical performances of ‘The Mysterious Cat’, ‘The Flower-Fed Buffaloes’ and parts of ‘The Congo’ exhibiting a fiery and furious, zany, at times incoherent delivery that appears to have owed more to jazz than poetry, though the highly religious Lindsay was always reluctant to align himself thus. Nevertheless, part of the success and great fame that Lindsay achieved — albeit briefly — was due to the singular manner in which he presented his poetry "fundamentally as a performance, as an aural and temporal experience...meant...to be chanted, whispered, belted out, sung, amplified by gesticulation and movement, and punctuated by shouts and whoops." [2] His best-known poem, "The Congo," exemplified his revolutionary aesthetic of sound for sound's sake. It imitates the pounding of the drums in the rhythms and in onomotopeic nonsense words. At parts, the poem ceases to use conventional words when representing the chants of Congo's indigenous people, relying just on sound alone.

Attitudes towards race

Most contemporaries acknowledged Lindsay's intention to be an advocate for African-Americans. This intention was particularly evident in the 1918 poem "The Jazz Birds", praising the war efforts of African-Americans during World War I, an issue to which the vast majority of white America seemed blind. Additionally, W.E.B. Du Bois hailed Lindsay's story "The Golden-Faced People" for its insights into racism. Lindsay saw himself as anti-racist not only in his own writing but in his encouragement of a writer; he credited himself with discovering Langston Hughes, who, while working as a busboy at a Washington, D.C. restaurant where Lindsay ate, gave Lindsay copies of his poems.

However, many contemporaries and later critics have contended over whether a couple of Lindsay's poems should be seen as homages to African and African-American music, as perpetuation of the "savage African" stereotype, or as both. DuBois, before reading and praising "the Golden-Faced People," wrote in a review of Lindsay's "Booker T. Washington Trilogy" that "Lindsay knows two things, and two things only, about Negroes: The beautiful rhythm of their music and the ugly side of their drunkards and outcasts. From this poverty of material he tries now and then to make a contribution to Negro literature." DuBois also criticized "The Congo," which has been the most persistent focus of the criticisms of racial stereotyping in Lindsay's work.

Subtitled "A Study of the Negro Race" and beginning with a section titled "Their Basic Savagery", "The Congo" reflects the tensions within a relatively isolated and pastoral society suddenly confronted by the industrialized world. The poem was inspired by a sermon preached in October 1913 that detailed the drowning of a missionary in the Congo River; this event had drawn worldwide criticism, as had the colonial exploitation of the Congo under the government of Leopold II of Belgium. Lindsay defended the poem; in a letter to Joel Spingarn, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the NAACP, Lindsay wrote that "My 'Congo' and 'Booker T. Washington Trilogy' have both been denounced by the Colored people for reasons that I cannot fathom....The third section of 'The Congo' is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race." Spingarn responded by acknowledging Lindsay's good intentions, but saying that Lindsay sometimes glamorized differences between people of African descent and people of other races, while many African-Americans wished to emphasize the "feelings and desires" that they held in common with others.

Similarly, critics in academia often portray Lindsay as a well-meaning but misguided primitivist in his representations of Africans and African Americans. One such critic, Rachel DuPlessis, argues that the poem, while perhaps meant to be "hopeful," actually "others" Africans as an inherently violent race. In the poem and in Lindsays's defenses of it, DuPlessis hears Lindsay warning white readers not to be "hoo-doo'd" or seduced by violent African "mumbo jumbo." This warning seems to suggest that white civilization has been "infected" by African violence; Lindsay thus, in effect, "blames blacks for white violence directed against them." Conversely, Susan Gubar notes approvingly that "the poem contains lines blaming black violence on white imperialism." While acknowledging that the poem seems to have given its author and audiences an excuse to indulge in "'romantic racism' or 'slumming in slang,'" she also observes that Lindsay was "much more liberal than many of his poetic contemporaries," and that he seems to have intended a statement against the kind of racist violence perpetrated under Leopold in the Congo.

Later years

Fame

Vachel Lindsay with Stephen Gwynne.

Lindsay's fame as a poet grew in the 1910s. Because Harriet Monroe showcased him with two other Illinois poets — Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters — his name became linked to theirs. The success of either of the other two, in turn, seemed to help the third.

Edgar Lee Masters published a biography of Lindsay in 1935 (four years after its subject's death) entitled 'Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America'.

Lindsay himself indicated in the 1915 preface to "The Congo" that no less a figure than William Butler Yeats respected his work. Yeats felt they shared a concern for capturing the sound of the primitive and of singing in poetry. In 1915, Lindsay gave a poetry reading to President Woodrow Wilson and the entire Cabinet.

Lindsay was well known throughout the nation, and especially in Illinois, because of his travels which were sometimes recorded on the front page of every newspaper.

Marriage, children and financial troubles

Despite his fame, Lindsay's private life featured many disappointments, such as his unsuccessful courtship in 1914 of fellow poet Sara Teasdale; she married a rich businessman, Ernst Filsinger. While this itself may have caused Lindsay to become more concerned with money, his financial pressures increased even more later on.

In 1924 he moved to Spokane, Washington, where he lived in room 1129 of the Davenport Hotel until 1929. On May 19, 1925, he married the 23-year-old Elizabeth Connor. The 45-year-old poet at this point found himself under great economic pressure, due at least in part to the new need to support his considerably younger wife. These financial worries escalated even more when in May 1926 the Lindsays had a daughter, Susan Doniphan Lindsay, and in September 1927 a son, Nicholas Cave Lindsay.

Desperate for money to meet the growing demands of his growing family, Lindsay undertook an exhausting string of readings throughout the East and Midwest that lasted from October 1928 through March 1929. During this time, Poetry magazine awarded him a lifetime achievement award of $500 (a substantial sum at the time).

After this tour, in April 1929, Lindsay and his family moved to the house of his birth in Springfield, Illinois: an expensive undertaking. In that same year, and coinciding with the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Lindsay published two more books of poems: The Litany of Washington Street and Every Soul A Circus.

He gained money by doing odd jobs throughout, but in general earned very little during his travels.

Suicide

Crushed by financial worry and in failing health from his six-month road trip, Lindsay sank into depression, and on December 5, 1931, committed suicide by drinking a bottle of lye. His last words were, "They tried to get me — I got them first!"

Today, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency helps to maintain the Vachel Lindsay House at 603 South Fifth Street in Springfield, the site of Lindsay's birth and death. The agency has donated the home to the state which then closed it to restore the home at a cost of $1.5 million. The site is now again open to the public giving full, guided tours for those who choose to ring the bell. The hours are Tues-Sat: 12-4:00pm. Lindsay's grave lies in Oak Ridge Cemetery. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a collection of his papers.

Selected works

• "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight"
• "An Indian Summer Day on the Prairie"
• "A Rhyme About an Electrical Advertising Sign"
• "A Sense of Humor"
• "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
• "The Dandelion"
• "Drying Their Wings"
• "Euclid"
• "Factory Windows are Always Broken"
• "The Flower-Fed Buffaloes"
• "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven"-the American Classical Composer Charles Ives would write music to this poem (with a couple of additional text alterations) shortly after its publication
• "In Praise of Johnny Appleseed"
• "The Kallyope Yell" — see calliope for references
• "The Leaden-Eyed"
• "Love and Law"
• "The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son"
• "On the Garden Wall"
• "The Prairie Battlements"
• The Golden Book of Springfield
• "Prologue to "Rhymes to be Traded for Bread" "
• "The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race"
• "The Eagle That is Forgotten"
• "The Firemen's Ball"
• "The Rose of Midnight"
• "This Section is a Christmas Tree"
• "To Gloriana"
• "What Semiramis Said"
• "What the Ghost of the Gambler Said"
• "Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket"
• "Written for a Musician"

German Poet Friedrich von Schiller 1759 - 1805

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (10 November 1759 – 9 May 1805) was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They frequently discussed issues concerning aesthetics, and Schiller encouraged Goethe to finish works he left as sketches. This relationship and these discussions led to a period now referred to as Weimar Classicism. They also worked together on Xenien, a collection of short satirical poems in which both Schiller and Goethe challenge opponents to their philosophical vision.

Friedrich Schiller was born on 10 November 1759, in Marbach, Württemberg as the only son of military doctor Johann Kaspar Schiller (1733–96), and Elisabeth Dorothea Kodweiß (1732–1802). They also had five daughters. His father was away in the Seven Years' War when Friedrich was born. He was named after king Frederick the Great, but he was called Fritz by nearly everyone. Kaspar Schiller was rarely home during the war, but he did manage to visit the family once in a while. His wife and children also visited him occasionally wherever he happened to be stationed. When the war ended in 1763, Schiller's father became a recruiting officer and was stationed in Schwäbisch Gmünd. The family moved with him. Due to the high cost of living—especially the rent—the family moved to nearby Lorch.

Although the family was happy in Lorch, Schiller's father found his work unsatisfying. He sometimes took his son with him. In Lorch, Schiller received his primary education. The quality of the lessons was fairly bad, and Friedrich regularly cut class with his older sister. Because his parents wanted Schiller to become a pastor, they had the pastor of the village instruct the boy in Latin and Greek. Pastor Moser was a good teacher, and later Schiller named the cleric in his first play Die Räuber (The Robbers) after him. As a boy, Schiller was excited by the idea of becoming a cleric and often put on black robes and pretended to preach.

In 1766, the family left Lorch for the Duke of Württemberg's principal residence, Ludwigsburg. Schiller's father had not been paid for three years, and the family had been living on their savings but could no longer afford to do so. So Kaspar Schiller took an assignment to the garrison in Ludwigsburg.

There the Schiller boy came to the attention of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg. He entered the Karlsschule Stuttgart (an elite military academy founded by the Duke), in 1773, where he eventually studied medicine. During most of his short life, he suffered from illnesses that he tried to cure himself.

While at the Karlsschule, Schiller read Rousseau and Goethe and discussed Classical ideals with his classmates. At school, he wrote his first play, The Robbers, which dramatizes the conflict between two aristocratic brothers: the elder, Karl Moor, leads a group of rebellious students into the Bohemian forest where they become Robin Hood-like bandits, while Franz Moor, the younger brother, schemes to inherit his father's considerable estate. The play's critique of social corruption and its affirmation of proto-revolutionary republican ideals astounded its original audience. Schiller became an overnight sensation. Later, Schiller would be made an honorary member of the French Republic because of this play.

In 1780, he obtained a post as regimental doctor in Stuttgart, a job he disliked.

Schiller on his deathbed – a drawing by the portraitist Ferdinand Jagemann, 1805

Following the performance of The Robbers in Mannheim, in 1781, Schiller was arrested, sentenced to 14 days of imprisonment, and forbidden by Karl Eugen from publishing any further works.

He fled Stuttgart in 1782, going via Frankfurt, Mannheim, Leipzig, and Dresden to Weimar, where he settled in 1787. In 1789, he was appointed professor of History and Philosophy in Jena, where he wrote only historical works.

He died of tuberculosis in 1805, at the age of 45.

Marriage and family

On 22 February 1790, Schiller married Charlotte von Lengefeld (1766–1826). Two sons (Karl Friedrich Ludwig and Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm) and two daughters (Karoline Luise Henriette and Luise Henriette Emilie) were born between 1793 and 1804. The last living descendant of Schiller was a grandchild of Emilie, Baron Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm, who died at Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1947.

Weimar and playwriting

Schiller returned with his family to Weimar from Jena in 1799. Goethe convinced him to return to playwriting. He and Goethe founded the Weimar Theater, which became the leading theater in Germany. Their collaboration helped lead to a renaissance of drama in Germany.

Legacy and honors

Lithograph portrait from 1905, captioned "Friedrich von Schiller" in recognition of his 1802 ennoblement

For his achievements, Schiller was ennobled in 1802 by the Duke of Weimar, adding the nobiliary particle "von" to his name. He remained in Weimar, Saxe-Weimar until his death at 45 from tuberculosis.

The first significant biography of Schiller was by his sister-in-law Caroline von Wolzogen in 1830.

The coffin containing Schiller's skeleton is in the Weimarer Fürstengruft (Weimar's Ducal Vault), the burial place of Houses of Grand Dukes (großherzogliches Haus) of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in the Historical Cemetery of Weimar. On 3 May 2008, scientists announced that DNA tests have shown that the skull of this skeleton is not Schiller's. The physical resemblance between this skull and the extant death mask as well as to portraits of Schiller, had led many experts to believe that the skull was Schiller's.

In September 2008, Schiller was voted by the audience of the TV channel Arte as the second most important playwright in Europe after William Shakespeare. Today, Schiller's legacy is purported to be carried on by the Schiller Institute, which is run by the LaRouche movement.

Freemasonry

Some Freemasons speculate that Schiller was a Freemason, but this has not been proved.

In 1787, in his tenth letter about Don Carlos, Schiller wrote:

"I am neither Illuminati nor Mason, but if the fraternization has a moral purpose in common with one another, and if this purpose for human society is the most important, ..."

In a letter from 1829, two Freemasons from Rudolstadt complain about the dissolving of their Lodge Günther zum stehenden Löwen that was honoured by the initiation of Schiller. According to Schiller's great-grandson Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm, Schiller was brought to the Lodge by Wilhelm Heinrich Karl von Gleichen-Rußwurm. No membership document has been found.

Writing

Philosophical papers

Schiller wrote many philosophical papers on ethics and aesthetics. He synthesized the thought of Immanuel Kant with the thought of Karl Leonhard Reinhold. He elaborated Christoph Martin Wieland's concept of the Schöne Seele (beautiful soul), a human being whose emotions have been educated by reason, so that Pflicht und Neigung (duty and inclination) are no longer in conflict with one another; thus beauty, for Schiller, is not merely an aesthetic experience, but a moral one as well: the Good is the Beautiful. His philosophical work was also particularly concerned with the question of human freedom, a preoccupation which also guided his historical researches, such as the Thirty Years' War and the Dutch Revolt, and then found its way as well into his dramas (the Wallenstein trilogy concerns the Thirty Years' War, while Don Carlos addresses the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain.) Schiller wrote two important essays on the question of the sublime (das Erhabene), entitled "Vom Erhabenen" and "Über das Erhabene"; these essays address one aspect of human freedom—the ability to defy one's animal instincts, such as the drive for self-preservation, when, for example, someone willingly sacrifices themselves for conceptual ideals.

The dramas

Schiller is considered by most Germans to be Germany's most important classical playwright. Critics like F.J. Lamport and Eric Auerbach have noted his innovative use of dramatic structure and his creation of new forms, such as the melodrama and the bourgeois tragedy. What follows is a brief, chronological description of the plays.

• The Robbers (Die Räuber): The language of The Robbers is highly emotional, and the depiction of physical violence in the play marks it as a quintessential work of Germany's Romantic 'Storm and Stress' movement. The Robbers is considered by critics like Peter Brooks to be the first European melodrama. The play pits two brothers against each other in alternating scenes, as one quests for money and power, while the other attempts to create revolutionary anarchy in the Bohemian Forest. The play strongly criticises the hypocrisies of class and religion, and the economic inequities of German society; it also conducts a complicated inquiry into the nature of evil.
• Fiesco (Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua):
• Intrigue and Love (Kabale und Liebe): The aristocratic Ferdinand von Walter wishes to marry Luise Miller, the bourgeois daughter of the city's music instructor. Court politics involving the duke's beautiful but conniving mistress Lady Milford and Ferdinand's ruthless father create a disastrous situation reminiscent of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Schiller develops his criticisms of absolutism and bourgeois hypocrisy in this bourgeois tragedy. Act 2, Scene 2 is an anti-British parody that depicts a firing-squad massacre. Young Germans who refused to join the Hessians and British to quash the American Revolutionary War are fired upon. Giuseppe Verdi's opera Luisa Miller is based on this play.
• Don Carlos: This play marks Schiller's entrée into historical drama. Very loosely based on the events surrounding the real Don Carlos of Spain, Schiller's Don Carlos is another republican figure—he attempts to free Flanders from the despotic grip of his father, King Phillip. The Marquis Posa's famous speech to the king proclaims Schiller's belief in personal freedom and democracy.
• The Wallenstein Trilogy: These plays follow the fortunes of the treacherous commander Albrecht von Wallenstein during the Thirty Years' War.
• Mary Stuart (Maria Stuart): This "revisionist" history of the Scottish queen, who was Elizabeth I's rival, portrays Mary Stuart as a tragic heroine, misunderstood and used by ruthless politicians, including and especially, Elizabeth.
• The Maid of Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans): about Joan of Arc
• The Bride of Messina (Die Braut von Messina)
• William Tell (Wilhelm Tell)
• Demetrius (unfinished)

The Aesthetic Letters

A pivotal work by Schiller was On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen), first published 1794, which was inspired by the great disenchantment Schiller felt about the French Revolution, its degeneration into violence and the failure of successive governments to put its ideals into practice. Schiller wrote that "a great moment has found a little people"; he wrote the Letters as a philosophical inquiry into what had gone wrong, and how to prevent such tragedies in the future. In the Letters he asserts that it is possible to elevate the moral character of a people, by first touching their souls with beauty, an idea that is also found in his poem Die Künstler (The Artists): "Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge."

On the philosophical side, Letters put forth the notion of der sinnliche Trieb / Sinnestrieb ("the sensuous drive") and Formtrieb ("the formal drive"). In a comment to Immanuel Kant's philosophy, Schiller transcends the dualism between Form and Sinn with the notion of Spieltrieb ("the play drive"), derived from, as are a number of other terms, Kant's Critique of the Faculty of Judgment. The conflict between man's material, sensuous nature and his capacity for reason (Formtrieb being the drive to impose conceptual and moral order on the world), Schiller resolves with the happy union of Form and Sinn, the "play drive," which for him is synonymous with artistic beauty, or "living form." On the basis of Spieltrieb, Schiller sketches in Letters a future ideal state (a eutopia), where everyone will be content, and everything will be beautiful, thanks to the free play of Spieltrieb. Schiller's focus on the dialectical interplay between Form and Sinn has inspired a wide range of succeeding aesthetic philosophical theory, including notably Jacques Rancière's conception of the "aesthetic regime of art," as well as social philosophy in Herbert Marcuse, in the second part of his important work Eros and Civilization, where he finds Schiller's notion of Spieltrieb useful in thinking a social situation without the condition of modern social alienation. He writes, "Schiller's Letters ... aim at remaking of civilization by virtue of the liberating force of the aesthetic function: it is envisaged as containing the possibility of a new reality principle."

Works

Plays

• Die Räuber (The Robbers), 1781
• Fiesco (Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua), 1783
• Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love), 1784
• Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien (Don Carlos), 1787
• Wallenstein, 1800
• Maria Stuart (Mary Stuart), 1800
• Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans), 1801
• Die Braut von Messina (The Bride of Messina), 1803
• Wilhelm Tell (William Tell), 1804
• Demetrius (unfinished at his death)

Histories

• Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung or The Revolt of the Netherlands
• Geschichte des dreißigjährigen Kriegs or A History of the Thirty Years' War
• Über Völkerwanderung, Kreuzzüge und Mittelalter or On the Barbarian Invasions, Crusaders and Middle Ages

Translations

• Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth
• Jean Racine, Phèdre
• Carlo Gozzi, Turandot, 1801

Prose

• Der Geisterseher or The Ghost-Seer (unfinished novel) (started in 1786 and published periodically. Published as book in 1789)
• Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of Letters), 1794
• Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (Dishonoured Irreclaimable), 1786

Poems

• An die Freude (Ode to Joy) (1785) became the basis for the fourth movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony
• Der Taucher (The Diver)
• Die Kraniche des Ibykus (The Cranes of Ibykus)
• Der Ring des Polykrates (Polycrates' Ring)
• Die Bürgschaft (The Hostage; set to music by Schubert)
• Das Lied von der Glocke (Song of the Bell)
• Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais (The Veiled Statue At Sais)
• Der Handschuh (The Glove)
• Nänie (set to music by Brahms)

Quotations

• "Stay true to the dreams of thy youth." (Elizabeth, in: Don Carlos)
• "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens," which means "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." (Talbot, in: The Maid of Orleans)
• "Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in any truth that is taught in life."
• "Eine Grenze hat die Tyrannenmacht", which literally means "A tyrant's power has a limit" (a Swiss freedom fighter, in: Wilhelm Tell)
• "The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." (Talbot, in: Maria Stuart)
• "It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons."
• "Live with your century but do not be its creature." (From On the Aesthetic Education of Man)

Musical settings of Schiller's poems and stage plays

Ludwig van Beethoven said that a great poem is more difficult to set to music than a merely good one because the composer must rise higher than the poet – "who can do that in the case of Schiller? In this respect Goethe is much easier," wrote Beethoven.

There are relatively few famous musical settings of Schiller's poems. Two notable exceptions are Beethoven's setting of "An die Freude" (Ode to Joy) in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, and Johannes Brahms' choral setting of "Nänie". In addition, several poems were set by Franz Schubert as Lieder, such as "Die Bürgschaft", mostly for voice and piano. In 2005 Graham Waterhouse set Der Handschuh (The Glove) for cello and speaking voice.

The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi admired Schiller greatly and adapted several of his stage plays for his operas: I masnadieri is based on The Robbers; Giovanna d'Arco on The Maid of Orleans; Luisa Miller on Intrigue and Love; and Don Carlos on the play of the same title. Donizetti's Maria Stuarda is based on Mary Stuart, and Rossini's Guillaume Tell is an adaptation of William Tell. The 20th century composer Giselher Klebe adapted The Robbers for his first opera of the same name, which premiered in 1957.

Schiller's burial

Here is a poem written about the poet's burial:

Two dim and paltry torches that the raging storm

And rain at any moment threaten to put out.

A waving pall. A vulgar coffin made of pine

With not a wreath, not e'en the poorest, and no train –

As if a crime were swiftly carried to the grave!

The bearers hastened onward. One unknown alone,

Round whom a mantle waved of wide and noble fold,

Followed this coffin. 'Twas the Spirit of Mankind.

– Conrad Ferdinand Meyer

Irish Poet Oliver Goldsmith 1730 - 1774

Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1730 – 4 April 1774) was an Anglo-Irish writer, poet and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770) (written in memory of his brother), and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, first performed in 1773). He also wrote An History of the Earth and Animated Nature. He is thought to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, the source of the phrase "goody two-shoes".

Goldsmith's birth date and year are not known with certainty. According to the Library of Congress authority file, he told a biographer that he was born on 29 November 1731, or perhaps in 1730. Other sources have indicated 10 November, on any year from 1727 to 1731. 10 November 1730 is now the most commonly accepted birth date.

The location of his birthplace is also uncertain. He was born either in the townland of Pallas, near Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland, where his father was the Anglican curate of the parish of Forgney, or at the residence of his maternal grandparents, at the Smith Hill House in the diocese of Elphin, County Roscommon where his grandfather Oliver Jones was a clergyman and master of the Elphin diocesan school. When he was two years old, Goldsmith's father was appointed the rector of the parish of "Kilkenny West" in County Westmeath. The family moved to the parsonage at Lissoy, between Athlone and Ballymahon, and continued to live there until his father's death in 1747.

In 1744 Goldsmith went up to Trinity College, Dublin. His tutor was Theaker Wilder. Neglecting his studies in theology and law, he fell to the bottom of his class. He was graduated in 1749 as a Bachelor of Arts, but without the discipline or distinction that might have gained him entry to a profession in the church or the law; his education seemed to have given him mainly a taste for fine clothes, playing cards, singing Irish airs and playing the flute. He lived for a short time with his mother, tried various professions without success, studied medicine desultorily at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Leiden, and set out on a walking tour of Flanders, France, Switzerland and Northern Italy, living by his wits (busking with his flute).

'A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds's'. Use a cursor to see who is who.

He settled in London in 1756, where he briefly held various jobs, including an apothecary's assistant and an usher of a school. Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, Goldsmith produced a massive output as a hack writer for the publishers of London, but his few painstaking works earned him the company of Samuel Johnson, with whom he was a founding member of "The Club". The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the epithet inspired idiot. During this period he used the pseudonym "James Willington" (the name of a fellow student at Trinity) to publish his 1758 translation of the autobiography of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe.

Goldsmith was described by contemporaries as prone to envy, a congenial but impetuous and disorganised personality who once planned to emigrate to America but failed because he missed his ship.

His premature death in 1774 may have been partly due to his own misdiagnosis of his kidney infection. Goldsmith was buried in Temple Church. The inscription reads; "HERE LIES/OLIVER GOLDSMITH". There is a monument to him in the center of Ballymahon, also in Westminster Abbey with an epitaph written by Samuel Johnson.

The Citizen of the World

In 1760 Goldsmith began to publish a series of letters in the Public Ledger under the title The Citizen of the World. Purportedly written by a Chinese traveler in England named Lien Chi, they used this fictional outsider's perspective to comment ironically and at times moralistically on British society and manners. It was inspired by the earlier essay series Persian Letters by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu.

The Hermit

Goldsmith wrote this romantic ballad of precisely 160 lines in 1765. The hero and heroine are Edwin, a youth without wealth or power, and Angelina, the daughter of a lord "beside the Tyne." Angelina spurns many wooers, but refuses to make plain her love for young Edwin. "Quite dejected with my scorn," Edwin disappears and becomes a hermit. One day, Angelina turns up at his cell in boy's clothes and, not recognizing him, tells him her story. Edwin then reveals his true identity, and the lovers never part again. The poem is notable for its interesting portrayal of a hermit, who is fond of the natural world and his wilderness solitude but maintains a gentle, sympathetic demeanor toward other people. In keeping with eremitical tradition, however, Edwin the Hermit claims to "spurn the [opposite] sex." This poem appears under the title of "A Ballad" sung by the character of Mr. Burchell in Chapter 8 of Goldsmith's novel, The Vicar of Wakefield.

The Deserted Village

In the 1760s Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of an ancient village and destruction of its farms to clear land to become a wealthy man's garden. His poem The Deserted Village, published in 1770, expresses a fear that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from productive agriculture to ornamental landscape gardens would ruin the peasantry.

The Deserted Village gave the demolished village the pseudonym "Sweet Auburn" and Goldsmith did not disclose the real village on which he based it. However, he did indicate it was about 50 miles (80 km) from London and it is widely believed to have been Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire, which Simon Harcourt, 1st Earl Harcourt had demolished and moved 1 mile (1.6 km) away to make the park for his newly built Nuneham House.

In Ireland the village described in the poem is thought to be Glasson village, nr Athlone. Signage around the village points out the association with Oliver Goldsmith. The village is also described as the "village of the roses" since in the poem Glasson appears as Sweet Auburn which locally means 'Roses'. Glasson was famous in the 1800s for its rose bloom and the local landlord, Robert Temple is said to have walked the village giving prizes for the best presented houses.

In popular culture, the poem's first line "Sweet Auburn, Loveliest village of the plain" is the basis for the term "Auburn Plainsman/Plainsmen" which is used to refer to an Auburn University student and is also the source for the name of the University student Newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman.

Other works

The ironic poem, An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog was published in 1766.

Goldsmith is also thought to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes.

Memorials concerning Oliver Goldsmith

A statue of Goldsmith at Trinity College, Dublin.

Goldsmith lived in Kingsbury, now in London between 1771–1774 and the Oliver Goldsmith Primary School there is named after him.

In the play Marx In Soho by Howard Zinn, Marx makes a reference to Goldsmiths' poem, The Deserted Village.

A statue of him stands at the Front Arch of Trinity College, Dublin.

His name has been given to a new lecture theatre and student accommodation on the Trinity College campus: Goldsmith Hall.

Somerset Maugham used the last line from An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog in his novel The Painted Veil (1925). The character Walter Fane's last words are The dog it was that died.

Auburn, Alabama and Auburn University were named for the first line in Goldsmith's poem: "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain." Auburn is still referred to as the 'loveliest village on the plains.'

There is a statue in Ballymahon County Longford.

London Underground locomotive number 16 (used on the Metropolitan line of the London Underground until 1962) was named Oliver Goldsmith.