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Alice Duer Miller's Politics and Poetry. A representative body elected by the people of the state. No, my son, criminals, lunatics and women are not people. Do legislators legislate for nothing? Oh, no; they are paid a salary. Of course, my son, just as much as men are.
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Miller, Are Women People? On 1 February , a witty new column, featuring news, quotations, poems, fictionalized conversations, statistics, and car- toons about gender inequalities appeared in the Sunday New York Tribune. Published by Oxford University Press. For permissions, please e-mail: Indeed, over the course of the following three and a half years, Miller repeatedly quoted Wilson, as well as other legislators and public figures explicitly or implicitly allied with the anti-suffrage campaign, foregrounding the gap between boasts about the extensiveness of American democracy and the practice of exclusion that refused to acknowledge half of its citi- zens as people at the polls: The column began as a miscellany of quotations of recent statements by Wilson, other politicians, writers, and public figures, such as the quotation about bringing the government back to the people cited above.
Usually the col- umn would feature eight to ten short items that quoted or summa- rized material from anti- and pro-suffrage publications from the US and around the world. Cuyler Bunner and librettist W. After years of being out of print, Are Women People? By quoting from prominent public figures in her lines in the newspaper, Miller gains the ear of her governors and the ear of readers who detect in her witty, popular poetry the emergence of a public and poetic voice for women. Quotation and Ventriloquism in Suffrage Literature In the 72 years between the drafting of the Declaration of Sentiments calling, among other things, for the enfranchisement of women and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment granting woman suffrage in , Americans wrote scores of novels, stories, poems, autobiographies, plays, and sketches as well as songs, film scripts, speeches, and slogans that depicted new feminist political strategies and produced supporters of the cause while experimenting with a range of aesthetics.
By the s, suffrage writers were marching together in parade formations, collaborating on state and national press committees, and forming publishing companies such as the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company and press syndicates such as the Leslie Bureau of Suffrage Education to create and distribute cam- paign materials. In much of the drama, fiction, poetry, autobiography, and journalistic sketches produced by American suffrage writers, historical femininity is staged as political, social, and sometimes literal voicelessness. These stunts and the texts that depict them function at once to observe and to defy the enduring prohibition of the woman speaking in public.
Well, if it is, then there is a deep disgrace resting upon the origin of this nation.
This nation originated in the sharpest sort of criticism of public policy. We originated, to put it in the vernacular, in a kick, and if it be unpatriotic to kick, why then the grown man is unlike the child.
We have forgotten the very principle of our origin if we have for- gotten how to object, how to pull down and build up, even to the extent of revolutionary practices, if it be necessary to readjust mat- ters. Similarly, ventriloquism is often used in suffrage texts either to depict women as spoken for by men who vote on behalf of their wives and daughters or to imagine ways that women can reverse this ventriloquism by rewriting patriarchal statements that deliber- ately or unconsciously exclude them.
This privileging of dialogue over individual utterance also influences several formal choices made by suffragist writers: These texts function like British suffrage texts which, according to literary historian Jane Marcus, fashion a discourse of interruption 9 by modeling tactics readers could then replicate in their local campaigns. Quotation gives Miller an opportunity to transform what she considers treacherous texts—generally accepted conservative understandings of gender that infused anti-suffrage ideology—into powerful weapons against themselves.
What does it mean to quote another: To quote is to call attention to utterance itself—its form, its logic, its occasion—and to assert a relation, of distance or proximity, fealty or subordination, to this utterance. For Miller, quotation performs many functions: She asserts a suffragist positionality, as both displaced and displacing. If anything, she may, through reframing, challenge the authority of these previous understandings by exposing their internal contradictions. When she was just 22, Alice and her sister Caroline Duer coauthored a well- received book of poems.
In , Miller authored a book of poems entitled Wings in the Night; in , she wrote Forsaking All Others, a novel in verse.
It drew columnists from the Algonquin Round Table and had a Sunday readership of over , people. When it returned to the pages of the Tribune on 6 December after an unexplained absence of 13 weeks, readers emphati- cally expressed approval. Following this brief absence, the column ran consecutively for another weeks: When the book Are Women People? Some suffragists cannot endure Anti-suffrage literature; Others, of whom I am one, Think it all the greatest fun. Full of darkest intimations. Oh, I never knew who wrote All these pamphlets dimly fateful.
Take, if you must, take away, Masque and opera and play, Games of chance and movie screens, Comic weeklies, magazines, Banish novels as impure: Leave my anti literature. Your words have been as gold from mine or mint, And no one could exaggerate my pleasure When you rushed into print.
This dialogue between father and son appears to function as a kind of democratic catechism, except that a child rather than an authority figure poses the questions, and the answers, which convey orthodox views on the subject, confuse rather than clarify. Like the column as a whole, this text asks ques- tions that can be heard as both fact finding and rhetorical. Its power rests on two contradictory definitions of people: Here the father, like President Wilson, initially defines people as those who elect the legislature, a group that excludes criminals, lunatics, and women, only to include women in his later definition of people as those who pay for the legislature.
What is most powerful here is not what is quoted or ventril- oquized but what is silenced.
Perfect Woman William Wordsworth , - She was a phantom of delight When first she gleam'd upon my sight; A lovely apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
I saw her upon nearer view, A Spirit, yet a Woman too! Her household motions light and free, And steps of virgin liberty; A countenance in which did meet Sweet records, promises as sweet; A creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food; For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
Glaspell's play, Trifles produced in , presents her recurrent theme of the new woman who seeks her dreams despite the hostility of the conservative, repressive world. For permissions, please e-mail: Miller also chose to write in traditional closed forms because familiar forms, rhymes, and patterns would make her poetry more memorable and persuasive. In the preface Wordsworth writes on the need for "common speech" within poems and argues against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric. This dialogue between father and son appears to function as a kind of democratic catechism, except that a child rather than an authority figure poses the questions, and the answers, which convey orthodox views on the subject, confuse rather than clarify. When the book Are Women People?
This poem is in the public domain. Lines Written in Early Spring. I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that. It is a Beauteous Evening, Cal It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquility; The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea; Listen!
I met a little cottage girl: In , while living in Grasmere, two of their children—Catherine and John—died. While the poems themselves are some of the most influential in Western literature, it is the preface to the second edition that remains one of the most important testaments to a poet's views on both his craft and his place in the world. In the preface Wordsworth writes on the need for "common speech" within poems and argues against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric. Wordsworth's most famous work, The Prelude Edward Moxon, , is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism.
The poem, revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry. Although Wordsworth worked on The Prelude throughout his life, the poem was published posthumously. Wordsworth spent his final years settled at Rydal Mount in England, travelling and continuing his outdoor excursions. Devastated by the death of his daughter Dora in , Wordsworth seemingly lost his will to compose poems.
Leave this field blank. Perfect Woman William Wordsworth , - She was a phantom of delight When first she gleam'd upon my sight; A lovely apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay.