Unit+V+Authors+and+Readings

Dear Students and Parents:

Welcome to the rest of Unit V. Below you will find links to author's biographies and literary activities that match up with our readings. This page is designed to assist students keep track of daily assignments and our readings. The first reading we will cover after our study of //The Great Gatsby// is T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfread Prufrock." The activities for this reading are as follows:





Because many of you expressed an interest in the horror genre, I have included another one of Eliot's poems that is delightfully unsettling. Here is the very interesting and creepy "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot:



The next author we will study in this unit is Ezra Pound. He was a brilliant but misguided person. Pound wrote what he termed a "translation" of an ancient Chinese poet Li Po's "A River Merchant Wife: A Letter." Interestingly enough, the translation he used was one that went from Japanese to English. In addition to this, Pound took many cultural liberties with his translation of Li Po's work. Pound's work itself is beautiful and sonorous, but not at all a translation. His version was extremely popular. As you can imagine, Chinese scholars were upset that Poe's translation enjoyed the fame and popularity that it did. I have included this translation (titled Ernesto Fenellosa) in these notes so that you can see how difficult it was for Poe to re-write the poem into something Western audiences could easily understand and enjoy. His author notes and the translation are as follows:



Ezra Pound was the driving force and one of two founders for the literary movement known as Imagism. More notes on Imagism are as follows:



Activity for class:



Ezra Pound was a master at spotlighting new literary talent, and a great discoverer of poetic and literary genius. All of the best writer's knew him, and he was instrumental in getting the careers of many of the writers in the Modernist literary movement started. As a matter of fact, one of the poets discovered by Pound that we will read in Unit V wrote more perscriptions than poems; he was also Ezra Pound's roommate in college. William Carlos Williams was a brilliant and patriotic poet and pediatrician. His work focused on simple yet beautiful characteristics of American life. Williams was also a fan of literary movements named "Dadaism" and "Cubism." Picasso was a famous cubist painter from this time period. Notes on his biographical information and the movements he followed in art and literature are as follows:



The next poet we will tackle in Unit V is named Edward Estlin or E.E. Cummings. He was a brilliant love poet and satirist. Notes on his biographical information are as follows:



E.E. Cummings, much like Emily Dickinson, was known for his eccentric use of punctuation and capitolization in his poetic works. He was dismissed by many critics as gimmicky or jejune in his writing style when he should have been recognized for his brilliance. His anti-communist stance also got him into trouble with leftist editors and academics. Robert Frost is generally accepted as the most popular poet of this time period, but E.E. gets my vote every time. He had a unique way of looking at and writing about the world around him. An example of a love poem by E.E. Cummings is as follows:



Another beautiful and very spiritual example of E.E. Cummings work is as follows:



Carl Sandburg wrote the brilliant poem "Chicago." In the poem, there are many, many visual images of the good and bad of Chicago. Here is a power point of some images of Chicago to help students better visualize some of the descriptions in the poem:



A look at literary theory and Robert Frost:



A vocabulary guide and classroom activity:





The next section to Unit V will be our study of the Harlem Renaissance. Please see the tab to your left with this title for more information!

I hope this helps parents and students have a better idea of what is going on in the classroom. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please contact me at Tina_Pennell@gwinnett.k12.ga.us or at 770-972-7642.

Sincerely, Tina Pennell :)