#American lit

[artandchocolate]

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

[andrumedus]

There is an ache that begins in the sound of an old blues song. It becomes a house where all the lights have gone out but one. And it burns and burns until there is only the blue smoke of dawn and everyone is sleeping in someone's arms even the flowers even the sound of a thousand silences. And the arms of night in the arms of day. Everyone except me.

Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War; “Summer Night”

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

"Some long-forgot, enchanted, strange, Sweet garden of a thousand years ago,"

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay, from "Interim"

via southerncrossreview.org

[llovelymoonn]

alice hoffman practical magic

kofi

[newvision]

— Richard Siken, from ‘Birds Hover the Trampled Field’ in War of the Foxes

[many-sparrows]

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, 2003

[heinrichheineee]

Nathaniel Hawthorne writing about Herman Melville. Journal entry date: November 12, 1856

“It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before”

Source: Jay Leyda, The Melville Log, A Documentary Life of Herman Melville: 1819-1891, vol. II

[empirearchives]

Herman Melville on Napoleon’s love for Ossian

Context: Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, originally as Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), and later combined under the title The Poems of Ossian.

“I am rejoiced to see Hazlitt speak for Ossian. There is nothing more contemptable in that contemptable man (tho' good poet, in his department) Wordsworth, than his contempt for Ossian. And nothing that more raises my idea of Napoleon than his great admiration for him.—The loneliness of the spirit of Ossian harmonized with the loneliness of the greatness of Napoleon.”

Melville wrote this around 1862 in the margins of his copy of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers and Lectures on the English Poets

Source: Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography - Volume 2, p. 436

[pattern-53-enfield]

The most devastating part of buying these was the teller asking "did you watch the wendigoon video".

[abracazabka]

"Why are some gays so obsessed with horror genres and why are the Hannibal queers so overcome by consumption of flesh as a metaphor for--" ask fucking Herman Melville. Go on. Resurrect him and ask. I want to know what was going on in that man's head.

[earlyamerica]

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. 1951.

[light20sblog]

"Were we born to rot in misery—were we born to be afraid ? I never knew you afraid ! If you'll only trust me, how little you will be dissapointed ! The world's all before us—and the world's very big. I know something about that."

The Portrait of a lady, Henry James

[andrumedus]

Morgan Parker, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night; “Greetings from Struggle City”

[Text ID: For a taste of your neck I would / burn my tongue]

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

Emily Dickinson

[llovelymoonn]

claire oshetsky chouette

kofi

[newvision]

— Danez Smith, iv. not an ode for John Crawford (a bop) from Black Movie