HAIKU by Matsuo Basho

HAIKU
- A short, unrhymed Japanese poem consisting of 17 syllables (5-7-5)
- A Japanese poetry form.

Qualities of Haiku:
- Haiku depend on imagery.
- Haiku are condensed; the poet leaves out all unnecessary words.
- Haiku are concerned with emotions; nature is used to reflect these emotions.
- Haiku rely heavily on the power of suggestion or connotation.

Matsuo Basho / Matsuo munefusa

- Born: 1644, Ueno, Iga province, Japan.
- Died: Nov. 28, 1694, Osaka, Japan
- Considered the greatest of the Japanese haiku poets; has been called the
Shakespeare of Japanese haiku verse because of his contributions to the
development of the form.
- As a boy, he played and studied with the son of his feudal lord in Kyoto.
- Before he began to compose haikai, he was in the service of a local samurai,
Todo Shinshichiro, but it is not clear whether he himself was a samurai.
- With his subdued, elegant verse, raised the haiku to the level of true literature.
- According to Basho:You should put into words The light in which you see
something Before it vanishes from your mind.

Alfred Lord, Tennyson

- born August 6th, 1809, at Somersby, Lincolnshire
- Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as "Break, Break, Break", "The
- Charge of the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears" and "Crossing the Bar".
- Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses,
although In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his best friend Arthur
Hallam, a fellow poet and fellow student at Trinity College, Cambridge
- The success of his 1842 Poems made Tennyson a popular poet, and in 1845 he
received a Civil List (government) pension of 200 a year, which helped relieve
his financial difficulties.
- his appointment in 1850 as Poet Laureate finally established him as the most
popular poet of the Victorian era.
- died on October 6, 1892, at the age of 83.

The Shijing
- Shijing is a collection of about three hundred poems.
- 311 poems to be exact, including six poems transmitted only by their titles.
- This text is often referred to by the roundabout number of poems included in it:
Shi san bai, or "the three hundred poems."
 - The date of the poems ranges approximately from 1100 to 600 B.C., and the
compilation was done probably around, or slightly before, the time of Confucius.
- Some have argued that Confucius edited the text, reducing the number of poems
from three thousand to three hundred. Although many scholars have been
skeptical about the assertion that Confucius had laid his hands on the formation
of the text of Shijing it was mentioned that Confucius thought very highly of the
social, political, and didactic functions of the poetry collection.
- The title has been translated into various English phrases, such as "Book of
Poetry," "Book of Songs," "Book of Odes," "Classic of Poetry," etc.
- Shi in Shijing means poetry; Jing means longitude, and by extension, texts of
prime importance with canonized status.
- Shijing is divided into three parts: feng (Airs), ya (Odes), and song (Hymns).

LI PO
- Also called Li Taipo / Li Bai
- Born 701, Sichuan province, China
- Died 762, Dangtu, Anhui province
- Chinese poet who rivaled Du Fu for the
- title of Chinas greatest poet.
- In 756 he became unofficial poet laureate to the military expedition of Prince Lin,
the emperors 16th son. The prince was soon accused of intending to set up an
independent kingdom and was executed; he was later on, arrested, released and
banished.
- According to popular legend, he drowned when, sitting drunk in a boat, he tried to
seize the moons reflection in the water.
- Li Po was a romantic in his view of life and in his verse. One of the most famous
wine drinkers in Chinas long tradition of imbibers, he frequently celebrated the
joy of drinking.
- He wrote about friendship, solitude, the passage of time, and the joys of nature
with brilliance and great freshness of imagination.

SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM

- Lim was born on 27 December 1944 in the historic town of Malacca, on the west
coast of the Malay Peninsula (in British Malaya), to a Hokkein-Malayan father,
Chin Som Lim and a Singaporean Chinese-Peranakan mother, Chye Neo Ang
Lim.
- she grew up in a big family of ten children, of which she was the third and the
only girl of six children borne by her mother, who later left the family when Lim
was eight.
- Her father remarried and the second wife, Lims stepmother, bore him four more
children.
- She is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism.
 - Her first collection of poems is entitled Crossing The Peninsula (published in
1980). The collection won her the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an
Asian and for a woman.
- Among several other awards that she has received, her memoir, Among the
White Moon Faces, received the American Book Award in 1997.
- Her first poem was published in the Malacca Times when she was ten. By the
age of eleven, she knew that she wanted to be a poet.
- She studied under federal scholarship at the University of Malaya, where she
earned a B.A. first class honors degree in English.
- At age of twenty-four, she entered graduate school at Brandeis University in
Walthalm, Massachusetts under a Fulbright scholarship, and received a PhD in
English and American Literature in 1973.
- Lim is married to Charles Bazerman, also a professor and chair of the Education
Department at University of California, Santa Barbara.
- Lims work reflects the ambivalent and complex imagination of a writer who is
Malaysian-Chinese and Asian-American at the same time.
- Lim is a professor in the English Department of the University of California in
Santa Barbara.
- According to Lim, her works are:
- ontological, [which] has to do with questions about the relation of an
individual to the
- exigencies of making sense of itself in the world, with or without others.
- She further maintains that the thematic strains that fascinate her are
- [the] social forces of race and ethnic divisiveness, colonialand gender
tensions, [and] the crises brought about by modern and intercultural politics.

The History of Foot Binding in China

- Legend has it that the origins of footbinding go back as far as the Shang dynasty
(1700-1027 B.C.). The Shang Empress had a clubfoot, so she demanded that
footbinding be made compulsory in the court.
- But historical records from the Song dynasty (960-1279 A.D.) date footbinding as
beginning during the reign of Li Yu, who ruled over one region of China between
961-975. It is said his heart was captured by a concubine, Yao Niang, a talented
dancer who bound her feet to suggest the shape of a new moon and performed a
"lotus dance."
- During subsequent dynasties, footbinding became more popular and spread from
court circles to the wealthy. Eventually, it moved from the cities to the
countryside, where young girls realized that binding their feet could be their
passport to social mobility and increased wealth.
- But the practice wasn't outlawed until 1912, when the Qing Dynasty had already
been toppled by a revolution. Beginning in 1915, government inspectors could
levy fines on those who continued to bind their feet. But despite these measures,
footbinding still continued in various parts of the country.
Gwendolyn Brooks
- Born: June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas Died: December 2, 2000 in Chicago
- was an American poet and teacher.
- She was the first black person (the term she less preferred to as an African-
American) to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize (1950).
- Received many honors.
- Wrote more than 20 books of poetry in her lifetime
- Served as poet laureate of Illinois from 1968 up to her death.
- Was a chronicler of black life.
- How do you see yourself, as a reader, in Brooks' poetry?
- PAIR-BY-PAIR WORK
- Many years later
- Write an equally short fictional poem that demonstrates any of the ff ideas:
- 1. How the character's days in the pool hall has influenced who he is today,
nearly fifty years later.
- 2. How he is like today after 50 years, in terms of well-being.

Thomas Stearns Eliot

- born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888.
- He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended
Harvard University.
- In 1910, he left the United States after earning both undergraduate and masters
degrees. He contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate.
- After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy,
but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he
married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher,
and later for a bank.
- It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra
Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication
of his work in a number of magazines, most notably The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock in Poetry in 1915.
- He became a British citizen in 1927.
- He was long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber
- Was eventually director of the publication house. After a notoriously unhappy first
marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933
- He married Valerie Fletcher in 1956.
- T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
- He died in London on Janurary 4, 1965.

EZRA POUND
- IN FULL EZRA LOOMIS POUND (BORN OCT. 30, 1885, HAILEY, IDAHO
U.S.DIED NOV. 1, 1972, VENICE, ITALY)
 - WAS AN EXPATRIATE AMERICAN POET AND CRITIC, AND A MAJOR
FIGURE IN THE EARLY MODERNIST MOVEMENT. HIS CONTRIBUTION TO
POETRY BEGAN WITH HIS DEVELOPMENT OF IMAGISM, A MOVEMENT
DERIVED FROM CLASSICAL CHINESE AND JAPANESE POETRY,
STRESSING CLARITY, PRECISION AND ECONOMY OF LANGUAGE.
- HIS BEST-KNOWN WORKS INCLUDE RIPOSTES (1912), HUGH SELWYN
MAUBERLEY (1920) AND THE UNFINISHED 120-SECTION EPIC, THE
CANTOS (191769).
- WORKING IN LONDON IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY AS FOREIGN
EDITOR OF SEVERAL AMERICAN LITERARY MAGAZINES, POUND HELPED
DISCOVER AND SHAPE THE WORK OF AMERICAN AND IRISH
CONTEMPORARIES SUCH AS T. S. ELIOT, JAMES JOYCE, ROBERT FROST,
AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY.
- Imagism
- WAS A MOVEMENT IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY ANGLO-AMERICAN
POETRY THAT FAVORED PRECISION OF IMAGERY, AND CLEAR,
SHARP LANGUAGE.

Pablo Neruda
- Born in Parral, Chile, on July 12, 1904
- - stirred controversy with his affiliation with the Communist Party and his
outspoken support of Joseph Stalin, Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro, but his
poetic mastery was never in doubt, and for it he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1971.
- - was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftal Reyes Basoalto in the Chilean town of Parral
in 1904.
- - Other awards: including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin
Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953
- - Neruda died just two years after receiving his Nobel Prize on September 23,
1973, in Santiago, Chile.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

- MASTER OF THE MACABRE
- Author, poet, editor and literary critic
- Born: 19 January 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
- Died: 07, October 1849
- Place of Death: Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
- Spouse: Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe
- Alma Mater: University of Virginia (dropped out), Military Academy at West Point
- Famous for his tales of horror and mystery
- His creative talents lead to the beginning of different literary genres, earning him
the nickname, Father of the Detective Story.
- Has greatly influenced modern writers such as Stephen King (It, The Shining, Pet
Sematary) and Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere,The Sandman comic book series, The
Graveyard Book).
- - In 2014, Dark Horse Comics released a comic book version of his stories and
poems in Edgar Allan Poes Spirits of the Dead HC
- Poe Toaster
- An unknown visitor paid homage to Poes grave annually beginning in
1949
- -Every Jan. 19, in the early hours of the morning, the person made a toast
of cognac to his grave and left three roses.
- The Cask of Amontillado a story rich in IRONY
- The name Fortunato which means the fortunate one.
- The setting of time: the carnival season when everything is fun and merry.
- The clothes worn by Fortunato: a jesters cloak (with bells jingling as they
went to where the Amontillado was).
- When Montresor tells Fortunato that he is luckily met.
- Montresors concern for Fortunatos bad cough that he suggested
Luchesi taste it instead of his health being aggravated by the nitre inhaled
in the vaults.
- The toast Montresor raised for Fortunatos long life.
- Montresor exhibited a talent for masonry which Fortunato doubted.
- The Montresors Coat of Arms
- Symbolizes and showcases that the Montresor family is a
vengeful family.
- Further proven with the bones/remains seen in their vaults. Were
these the past victims of their family?
- The Amontillado
- - Was clearly the Bait from which Fortunato was able to lure
Montresor to his death.
- The Death of Fortunato
- Narrated by Montresor after 50 years.
- Fortunato was buried alive.
- Told to a confessor, policeman, or relative.
- Coat of Arms
- An arrangement of bearings, usually depicted on and around a
shield, that indicates ancestry and distinctions.
- the heraldic bearings of a person, family, or corporation.
- Nemo me impune lacessit
- No one injures me with impunity
- One cannot do me wrong and expect to receive no consequences.
- Montresor shows that he must go a step further and demonstrate
to Fortunato that he feels that way.