Synopsis
In fifty-four poems, Ann Struthers evokes the lives and times of the group of writers who gathered around Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts in the middle of the 19th Century, and of some of those who were more distantly connected with Emerson's circle. These were the literary and political revolutionaries at the center of the intellectual ferment that helped to give a distinctive savor to our national character in the first great flowering of American literary culture. Here are Louisa May Alcott as an army nurse in the Civil War; Margaret Fuller, the first woman war correspondent, covering the Italian revolution; Harriet Beecher Stowe placing a reproduction of the half-naked Venus de Milo in her Hartford window; Herman Melville in the Holy Land; Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson ice-skating on the Concord River.
Each poem recreates a particular moment, showing vividly the material and spiritual circumstances in which famous writers lived and worked. In "Writing Moby-Dick," Struthers shows us Melville feeding pumpkins to his cow in the icy barn at Arrowhead, while his imagination explores warmer realms, and his women keep his home orderly.
These are poems for lovers of American literature who want to catch glimpses of "dead" writers as living people; for teachers who want to enrich students' pictures of these authors; and for all who want to read poems that yield beauty on first reading and bounty as they are read again and again.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Ann Struthers is writer-in-residence and visiting professor of English at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA.
From the Inside Flap
In fifty-four poems, Ann Struthers-author of From Persia and Other Places and Stoneboat-evokes the lives and times of the group of writers who gathered around Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts in the middle of the 19th Century, and of some of those who were more distantly connected with Emerson's circle. These were the literary and political revolutionaries at the center of the intellectual ferment that helped to give a distinctive savor to our national character in the first great flowering of American literary culture. Here are Louisa May Alcott as an army nurse in the Civil War; Margaret Fuller, the first woman war correspondent, covering the Italian revolution; Harriet Beecher Stowe placing a reproduction of the half-naked Venus de Milo in her Hartford window; Herman Melville in the Holy Land; Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson ice-skating on the Concord River.
Each poem recreates a particular moment, showing vividly the material and spiritual circumstances in which famous writers lived and worked. In "Writing Moby-Dick," Struthers shows us Melville feeding pumpkins to his cow in the icy barn at Arrowhead, while his imagination explores warmer realms, and his women keep his home orderly.
These are poems for lovers of American literature who want to catch glimpses of "dead" writers as living people; for teachers who want to enrich students' pictures of these authors; and for all who want to read poems that yield beauty on first reading and bounty as they are read again and again.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This poem presents Louisa May Alcott's mother, the model for Marmee in the "Little Women" stories, but here shown putting up with transcendentalist foolishness at the Fruitlands Commune. One can read Alcott's own account of the Fruitlands adventure in "Transcendental Wild Oats," which appears in Alternative Alcott, edited by Elaine Showalter.
The Kitchen of Truth and Righteousness
By Ann Struthers
Abba Alcott, the judge's privileged daughter,
now bakes bread without yeast
to save those minute lives,
scrubs pans with sand-,
can't use soap made from animal fats.
spends most of her daylight hours
propitiating the cookstove,
squatting like Caliban in the kitchen,
always demanding attention-he needs chips
for kindling, armloads of firewood, chopped
and carried for his greedy belly,
ashes to be emptied, grates to be cleaned,
stovepipe to be taken down, scrubbed out
to remove explosive soot,
and always blacking for his iron face.
Cross, dead-tired, she writes in her journal,
"A woman may labor daily in the kitchen
for the cause of truth and righteousness,
but she lives neglected, dies forgotten.
A man who never performed one self-denying act,
but who has accidental gifts of genius...
is crowned with laurel, while scarce a stone
may tell where she lies."
But she is not ready to die,
saves her good humor for the children
whose whoops of pleasure she loves,
laughs and shouts with them,
but once in a while when she passes
the grinning stove as she hurries about
her kitchen duties, she kicks its iron foot-
but lightly, so as not to hurt her own toes
inside the cloth slippers, which they all wear,
because leather exploits cows.
Copyright (c) 1993 by Ann Struthers.
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