Echoes Of The Vacillating Heart

Victor-Marie Hugo (1802-1885), was a prominent literary figure during the nineteenth century Romantic Movement in France. He was an eminent French novelist, poet, playwright and essayist. It was his poetry that first earned him fame in the literary world and later his novels and plays brought him recognition. https://youtu.be/J1Rl-ktNrkM The Pool and the Soul ("Comme dans les étangs.") Translated by R.F. HODGSON. Music Credits: Underwater Exploration by Godmode

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is one of the most important American poets of the 19th century. Although only a few of her poems were published during her lifetime, her body of work—nearly 1,800 poems altogether—has become a staple of the American literary canon, and is now considered among the finest in the English language. Poetry Video: https://youtu.be/2-22eVT5-yM Music Credits: Seasons by Delicate Steve

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet widely recognized as one of German language's greatest 20th century poets. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence and though he is most known for his contributions to German literature, over 400 of his poems, were originally written in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland.  Through his writings, he invokes images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and anxiety. These themes position him as a transitional figure between traditional and modernist writers and makes his works much sought after in the current age of existential angst. Poetry Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5YwjMlFowY Music credits: Auckland by VYEN

They say that the plants do not speak ("Dicen que no hablan las plantas") Translated by Kate Flores. Rosalia de Castro (1837-1885) was a Galician writer, best known for her poetry and for her contribution to the revival of the Galician language in Spain. She was also one of the leading figures of the ‘Rexurdimento’ (Galician Revival), a literary movement that bloomed during the second half of the 19th century that aimed to liberate Galicia from its cultural and political ostracism. Poetry video: https://youtu.be/W1Hc6FwpYe0 Music Credits: Good evening by Amine Maxwell

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. https://youtu.be/pVgWrEYt6WI

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is one of the most significant poets of the 19th century, and many critics consider him America's greatest poet. His book "Leaves of Grass," is a masterpiece of American literature. In addition to writing poetry, Whitman worked as a journalist and volunteered in military hospitals. https://youtu.be/gWRy9x5rSMw

Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931; Gibran also spelled Jibran, Khalil also spelled Kahlil, Arabic name in full Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān) was a Lebanese author, philosopher, poet and artist. His poetry is notable for its use of formal language and insights on topics of life using spiritual terms. Gibran's best-known work is The Prophet, a book composed of 26 poetic essays. He was a key figure in the Romantic movement that transformed Arabic literature in the first half of the twentieth century. https://youtu.be/ndMyF8G59hw

E.E. Cummings (1894—1962), was an American poet, painter, author, essayist and playwright who created a niche for himself in English poetry through his remarkable literary experimentations with style. A typical Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes. The irregular punctuation seen in most of his poems are not by accident. That is how cummings intended them to be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqG9trOaSq8

Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931; Gibran also spelled Jibran, Khalil also spelled Kahlil, Arabic name in full Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān) was a Lebanese author, philosopher, poet and artist. His poetry is notable for its use of formal language and insights on topics of life using spiritual terms. Gibran's best-known work is The Prophet, a book composed of 26 poetic essays. He was a key figure in the Romantic movement that transformed Arabic literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Poetry Video: https://youtu.be/yRttESa3gAU

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was Chilean writer, diplomat and politician and one of the most influential and widely read poets of the 20th-century. He wrote in a variety of styles and his body of work includes surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Poetry Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMuOemOsYfw

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet widely recognized as one of German language's greatest 20th century poets. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence and though he is most known for his contributions to German literature, over 400 of his poems, were originally written in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland.  Through his writings, he invokes images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and anxiety. These themes position him as a transitional figure between traditional and modernist writers and makes his works much sought after in the current age of existential angst.

Gerald Gould (1885 – 1936) was an English poet, essayist, journalist and reviewer. He was involved in several movements associated with social causes. A socialist by persuasion, he became a member of the British Labour Party. He was also known to be a strong advocate of women’s suffrage. Gould was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire and brought up in Norwich. He studied at University College, London and Magdalen College, Oxford. Gould had a position at University College from 1906, and was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford from 1909 to 1916.  In 1907, several left-wing intellectuals including Gould formed the Men’s League For Women’s Suffrage. Three years later, he married Barbara Ayrton, the daughter of prominent electrical engineers and inventors, Hertha and William Ayrton. She was at the time an active member of the Women Social & Political Union. Michael Ayrton, the British artist, was Gould and Barbara's son. From 1914, Gould  was an official in Masterman's Wellington House Propaganda Department, which may explain his failure to produce much poetry concerned with the War. He also worked as a journalist on the Daily Herald as one of Lansbury's Lambs — a group of idealistic young men helping with it after George Lansbury purchased it in 1913. It was probably Gould who brought Siegfried Sassoon to the paper as literary Editor after its relaunch in 1919. Gould served as associate editor of the Herald from 1919 to 1921, and was literary editor of Saturday Review from 1922 to 1926. Gould regularly contributed poetry to the Herald and gave several sonnets to Millicent Fawcett's Common Cause when it became the Woman's Leader in 1920.  Gould also reviewed novels for the New Statesman, moving to The Sunday Observer as fiction editor in 1920. He was also made chief reader for Victor Gollancz Ltd., where he was involved in the early publication history of George Orwell. He died at London in 1936. Though much  of Gould’s  poetry, now, remains buried in the columns of newspapers and periodicals, the reader who chooses to revisit can discover a body of work that exudes a timeless charm. Video Poetry: https://youtu.be/an-RJXbIZOU Music Credits: Cumbia City An jone

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher, poet and naturalist considered an important contributor to the American literary and philosophical movement known as New England transcendentalism. He is best known for his work, “Walden” in which by reflecting upon simple living in natural surroundings, he draws up a philosophical treatise on labour, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism. In 1838, Thoreau decided to start his own school in Concord, eventually asking John to help him. When John endured a lengthy illness in 1841, the school became too much for Henry to handle alone, so he closed it. He returned to work in the pencil factory but was soon invited to work as a live-in handyman in the home of his mentor, neighbor, and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was by then already one of the most famous American philosophers and men of letters. Since Thoreau's graduation from Harvard, he had become a protégé of his famous neighbor and an informal student of Emerson's Transcendental ideas. During the two years he lived with him, Thoreau imbibed these ideas and modified them to suit his own temperament. During the same time, Thoreau got help from Emerson in getting some poems and essays published in the Transcendental journal, The Dial. Meanwhile, remembering a summer visit to the retreat cabin of college friend Charles Stearns Wheeler, Thoreau developed a plan to build such a house for himself where he could find privacy to write. Thus, in 1845, on a piece of land owned by Emerson, on the shore of Walden Pond, he built himself a small house, moving in on the Fourth of July. He wanted to conduct an economic experiment to see if it was possible to live contentedly with bare essentials. His nature study and the writing of “Walden” would later develop from his journal entries during the time.   Thoreau stayed in the house at Walden Pond for two years, from July 1845 to September 1847. “Walden” condenses the experiences of those two years into one year for artistic unity. During these two years he also spent one night in jail, an incident which occurred in the summer of 1846 and which became the subject of his essay "Resistance to Civil Government" (later known as "Civil Disobedience”). The essay later came to influence the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. VIdeo Poetry: https://youtu.be/mZUl-vA3f9w

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950) was an American lyrical poet and playwright who came to personify romantic rebellion and bravado in the 1920s. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923 and was the third woman in history to receive the honour. Considered to be one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, her poetry and her way of life, both subversive, inspired a generation of  women. As great as her writing was, her personality was even more riveting. She was loved for her enchanting readings and performances, her progressive political stances, frank portrayal of both hetero and homosexuality, and, above all, her embodiment and description of new kinds of female experience and expression.   Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, to Cora Lounella Buzelle, a nurse, and Henry Tolman Millay, a schoolteacher who would later become a superintendent of schools. Millay’s unusual name stemmed from a personal family history. Her middle name, “St. Vincent” came from a nearby hospital which was responsible for saving her uncle’s life just before her birth. The family felt grateful for the miracle and gave the child the name. Millay was reared by a strong, independent  and  divorced mother, who recognized and cultivated her talents. Encouraged to read the classics at home, she was too rebellious to make a success of her formal education, but she won many prizes for her poetry from  an early age. Her first published poem appeared in the St. Nicholas Magazine for children in October 1906. Her first acclaim came when her poem “Renascence” was included in The Lyric Year in 1912.  The poem brought Millay to the attention of a benefactor who made it possible for her to attend Vassar College. She graduated in 1917. In the same year, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems, and moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There she became a lively and admired figure among the avant-garde and radical literary set. Millay’s ravishing appearance, the independent, almost petulant tone of her poetry, and her political and social ideals made her a symbol of the youth of her time.  In the early 1920s, she worked as a contract writer for ‘Vanity Fair’ and traveled throughout Europe. She was noted for her uninhibited lifestyle, forming many passing relationships with both men and women. In 1923, she  married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch businessman with whom, from 1925,  she lived in a large, isolated house in the Berkshire foothills near Austerlitz, New York .  During the years of WWII, Millay was an active proponent of pacifism. She wrote in support of the Allied Forces and helped to create propaganda for the Writers’ War Board.  The bravado and stylish cynicism of much of Millay’s early work gave way in later years to more personal and mature writing, and she produced, particularly in her sonnets and other short poems, a considerable body of intensely lyrical verse. In 1944, Millay’s  health took a turn for the worse and she suffered a mental breakdown. This change in her condition kept her from writing for the next couple of years. She passed away in 1950 of a heart attack after suffering a fall down the stairs of her house. Her husband had died a year earlier. They are both buried at their estate in Steepletop which is now the site of the seven-acre, Millay Colony for the Arts.  Millay’s legacy lives on. She has recently been named one of history’s most important LGBTQ icons. Her final collection of poems was published posthumously as the volume "Mine the Harvest". The title sonnet describes the trajectory of her career beautifully: Those hours when happy hours were my estate, — Entailed, as proper, for the next in line, Yet mine the harvest, and the title mine — Those acres, fertile, and the furrows straight, From which the lark would rise — all of my late Enchantments, still, in brilliant colours, shine.

Anna Akhmatova is the pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (1889 - 1966), a Russian poet, credited as one of the most acclaimed poets of the 20th century. Her style, characterized by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries and with her strong female voice, she struck a new chord in Russian poetry. Besides poetry, she wrote prose that includes memoirs, autobiographical pieces, and literary scholarship on Russian writers besides translations of Italian, French, Armenian, and Korean poetry. In her lifetime, Akhmatova experienced both pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia. Even under the repressive regime, despite many of her friends and contemporaries choosing to emigrate, she refused to leave the Soviet Union. The entire trajectory of her life and work changed course because of this one decision. Like many of her brilliant contemporaries such as Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities. She faced immense difficulties living in the shadow of Stalinism and meticulously wrote about it. Her writing can be broadly said to fall into two periods—the early works (1912–25) and the later works (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output. Her perennial themes include meditations on time and memory.  Primary sources of information about Akhmatova's life are relatively scant, as war, revolution and the Soviet regime caused much of the written record to be destroyed. For long periods, she was in official disfavor and many of those who were close to her died in the aftermath of the revolution. Akhmatova's first husband, the famous poet, Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed by the  Soviet secret police, and her son Lev Gumilyov and her common-law husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag, where Punin died. Although she lived a long life, Akhmatova’s life was darkened disproportionately by many such calamitous moments. Isaiah Berlin, who visited Akhmatova in her Leningrad apartment in November 1945 while serving in Russia as first secretary of the British embassy, is said to have described her as a “tragic queen”. Berlin’s assessment has echoed through generations of readers who understand Akhmatova—her person, poetry, and, more nebulously, her poetic persona as the iconic representation of noble beauty and catastrophic predicament. Video poetry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99h0Mi5d0PI