Programme 11

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)
From Advertisement For The Waldorf-Astoria (1931)

The poet

James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen. Then he moved to Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband. It was in Illinois that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduating, he took odd jobs before completing his degree several years later. Hughes's first book of poetry was published in 1926. He also wrote short stories and novels.

In the middle of the depression in the 1920s, the Waldorf-Astoria opened – renting a suite of rooms in the Waldorf cost thousands per year, and dinner in the Sert Room was ten dollars! (Black people, even if they had the money, couldn't eat there). The hotel opened at the very time when people were sleeping on newspapers in doorways, because they had no place to go. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

During the time of the Harlem Renaissance, (which was an artistic movement that celebrated black life and culture in the 1920s) Langston Hughes was one of the most influential writers and thinkers. Hughes's talents were influenced by his life in New York. He had a strong sense of racial pride and through his poetry, novels, plays, essays, and children's books, condemned racism and injustice, promoted equality and celebrated African-American culture.

The poem

      Fine living… à la carte?
      Come to the Waldorf-Astoria!

      LISTEN HUNGRY ONES!
Look! See what Vanity Fair says about the
      new Waldorf-Astoria:

      "All the luxuries of private home …"
Now, won't that be charming when the last flop-house
      has turned you down this winter?
      Furthermore:
"It is far beyond anything hitherto attempted in the hotel
      world…." It cost twenty-eight million dollars.
      The famous Oscar Tschirky is in charge of banqueting.
      Alexandre Gastaud is chef. It will be a distinguished
      background for society.
So when you've no place else to go, homeless and hungry
      ones, choose the Waldorf as a background for your rags –
(Or do you still consider the subway after midnight good
      enough?)

      ROOMERS
Take a room at the new Waldorf, you down-and-outers –
      sleepers in charity's flop-houses where God pulls a
      long face, and you have to pray to get a bed.
They serve swell board at the Waldorf-Astoria. Look at this menu, will you:

      GUMBO CREOLE
      CRABMEAT IN CASSOLETTE
      BOILED BRISKET OF BEEF
      SMALL ONIONS IN CREAM
      WATERCRESS SALAD
      PEACH MELBA

Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.
      Why not?
Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of
      your labor, who clip coupons with clean white fingers
      because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed garments,
      poured steel to let other people draw dividends
      and live easy.

(Or haven't you had enough yet of the soup-lines and the bitter bread of charity?)
Walk through Peacock Alley tonight before dinner, and get
      Warm, anyway. You've got nothing else to do.

Back to top

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844–1889)
Pied Beauty (1877)

The poet

Gerard Manley Hopkins came from a large family and lived in London. He was educated at Highgate School, then at Oxford, where he became a Roman Catholic, and then a Jesuit priest. After studying theology in Wales, he worked as a parish priest in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow and Chesterfield. Hopkins was a schoolteacher from 1882 to 1884 and then appointed Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin. He kept this post until he died of typhoid fever aged 45.

Hopkins wrote with a sense of total faith in God. He explained his views as only seeing the oneness of natural things, their divine pattern and underlying form. He called this 'inscape'. Seeing this underlying order and unity is, according to Hopkins, experienced as 'instress'. The idea of God in nature may seem strange to modern man, but some of Wordsworth's poetry reveals similar ideas and the Biblical Psalms repeatedly tell us how God's glory is found in nature.

In his lifetime he published very little of his poetry, and was not well known until later. He is considered to be a technical innovator, because of his use of metre - though the form of rhythm associated with him (Hopkins called it 'sprung rhythm') is found in Old and Middle English poetry.

The poem

Glory be to God for dappled things –
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                                Praise him.

Back to top

MARGARET CAVENDISH (1623–1673)
Of Many Worlds in This World (1653)

The poet

Margaret Cavendish was born near Colchester. She was educated at home in the 'feminine arts'. During the English Civil War, Lucas was Maid of Honour to Queen Henrietta Maria from 1643 to 1645. While in exile with the Queen, Lucas married William Cavendish, a leader of the Royalist forces and thirty years older than her. William and Margaret became the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle and retired from court life. Margaret's unconventional dress and 'hobbies' were indulged by her husband and she developed as a prolific writer and amateur scientist.

She wrote a total of fourteen works on a broad selection of topics: scientific and philosophical treatises, science fiction, a biography, an autobiography, essays, letters, poetry, 'orations'. Cavendish argues that all of nature has innate self-knowledge, and possibly an innate knowledge of the 'Author of Nature' or God.

Margaret continually reminded her readers that she was a woman and that she wrote about a wide variety of feminist topics. In this she was seen as rather eccentric but continued to explore new elements in feminist thought and analysis.

Margaret Cavendish is buried in Westminster Abbey.

The poem

Just like unto a Nest of Boxes round,
Degrees of sizes within each Boxe are found.
So in this World, may many Worlds more be,
Thinner, and lesse, and lesse still by degree;
Although they are not subject to our Sense,
A World may be no bigger then two-pence.
Nature is curious, and such worke may make,
That our dull Sense can never finde, but scape.
For Creatures, small as Atomes, may be there,
If every Atome a Creatures Figure beare.
If foure Atomes a World can make, then see,
What severall Worlds might in an Eare-ring bee.
For Millions of these Atomes may bee in
The Head of one small, little, single Pin.
And if thus small, then Ladies well may weare
A World of Worlds, as Pendents in each Eare.

Back to top

SYLVIA PLATH (1932–1963)
The Arrival of the Bee Box (1965)

The poet

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston. Her father, who was a professor of biology at Boston University, and specialized in bees, died when she was young. Her relationship with her mother was not good. She put all her energy into becoming a model student, winning prizes and scholarships. But success and moods of deep depression affected her life from an early age. In 1955 she won a scholarship to study at Cambridge University and there she met poet Ted Hughes. They married but she did go back to Boston for a year and worked as a clerk and studied poetry. Plath returned to England in 1959 and they had two children.

She was a very talented writer, influenced by her husband and the work of Dylan Thomas and Gerald Manley Hopkins. However, she was plagued with mental breakdowns and made an attempt at suicide. A record of her encroaching mental illness was found in the poems collected after her suicide in 1963. Plath's best-known poems are noted for their personal imagery and intense focus. Her 'Selected Poems' were published by Ted Hughes in 1985.

When Ted Hughes abandoned her for an another woman, fantasies of self-destruction took over Plath's resolution. In hundreds of pages of a work in progress Plath shares her self-scrutiny in an honest way. In one of her final poems she wrote: 'Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.'

Plath died in London on 11 February 1963; she committed suicide. Her 'Collected Poems' (1981), assembled and edited by Ted Hughes, won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

The poem

I ordered this, this clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

Back to top