The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Poem: "Aftermath" by George Held, from Grounded . © Finishing Line Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Aftermath

It's not the storm itself—wind and rain lashing shore,
uprooting trees, toppling poles and dousing lights,
flooding cellars and roads, capsizing boats—
but the aftermath—the bright calm, the pair
of drowned cats crumpled against the picket fence,
the parlor of Izzy's shack open for inspection,
the walls fallen flat on all sides, your own
roof filling the front yard, covering your car,
and your own twin daughters dazed by Nature's
petulance—that makes you reconsider
your life and weigh your possessions and the cost
of putting down stakes too near the coast
as the globe warms, and storms grow worse.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist Joseph Conrad, (books by this author) born in Berdichev, Ukraine (1857), whose father was arrested for trying to start an insurrection against the Russian government. The family had to go into exile in Northern Russia, and both of Conrad's parents died there from TB. He was sent to live with his uncle, and he started to dream about traveling the world. He once looked at a map, pointed at the middle of Africa, and said, "Someday I will go there." He began hopping French Merchant Marine ships, and by the time he was 21 he had joined the British merchant Navy, even though he spoke barely a word of English. He spent the next decade sailing to Australia, Borneo, Malaysia, South America, and the South Pacific. And in 1889, while stationed in London, he began writing his first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895).

But it was in 1890 that he got to go to the Africa he'd dreamed about as a kid, with a job piloting a steamboat up the Congo River. He thought the journey would be an exotic adventure, but he later described what he saw there as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human conscience." The Congo was under the control of King Leopold II of Belgium at the time, and the colonists forced the local Africans into slave labor camps, gathering ivory and rubber. They arrested, abused, or killed anyone who refused to work. It's been estimated that between 1880 and 1920, half of the local population in the Congo was wiped out. There were stories of colonists sending home African heads to be stuffed by taxidermists.

No one knows exactly what Conrad saw in the time he worked in the Congo, because he didn't keep a diary at the time or write any letters about it. But instead of staying on the job for the three years he had planned, he quit after only four months. And it was not long after that that he gave up the life of a sailor altogether and settled down to life of writing.

His early novels were tales of adventure at sea. It took him more than 10 years to write about his experiences in the Congo in his novel Heart of Darkness (1902), about a steamboat captain named Marlow who pilots his ship up the Congo in search of mysterious trading agent named Mr. Kurtz who has set himself up as a kind of god among the natives of the jungle, and has surrounded his trading post with severed heads on stakes. Critics had long thought that Conrad's description of the brutality in the Congo was exaggerated, but scholars in the last decade have discovered that there was a Belgian man there at the time who surrounded his house with severed heads on stakes, and it's possible that Conrad met him.

Joseph Conrad said, "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." He also said, "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."

It was on this day in 1947 that Tennessee Williams' (books by this author) A Streetcar Named Desire premiered in New York City. Williams spent months writing and revising the play, and he had three different working titles for it: The Moth, Blanche's Chair on the Moon, and The Poker Night. Then he moved to an apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he could hear two streetcars rattling by, one named Desire and one named Cemeteries. He changed the setting of his play to New Orleans, and he changed the title to A Streetcar Named Desire.

Stella was originally played by Kim Hunter, Blanche by Jessica Tandy, and Stanley by a 23-three-year-old Marlon Brando. The play got a 30-minute standing ovation on opening night, and it ran for over 800 performances.

Poem: "The Ballad of Woodrow Wilson" by Michael Lind, from Parallel Lives. © Etruscan Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Ballad of Woodrow Wilson

Tall as the morning, he told the crowd
      from his railroad car:
"The League of Nations is our chance
      to save the world from war."

Columbus and St. Louis, then
      Des Moines. "A heaven-sent
occasion to preserve the peace,"
      declared the President.

In Omaha he had a cough.
      The rocking of the train
prevented him from sleeping all
      across the starry plain.

"America's the savior of
      the world," the towns-folk heard
in Bismarck. On to Cour d'Alene:
      "I give you all my word."

In San Diego he was tense,
      in Salt Lake City terse.
"Without the League, another war
      will come, a war much worse."

At Pueblo, Woodrow Wilson saw
      the children and exclaimed:
"These boys, when they are grown, must not
      be drafted, killed and maimed,"

He gripped the railing. "All our boys,
      they will have died in vain
if we should fail..." The curtains closed
      on the departing train.

The waiting crowd in Wichita
      was told the president
was ill. Eastward across the grass
      the locomotive went.

The engine, with a long deep wail,
      dragged the curtained car
over the miles of track that soon
      the boys would ride to war.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, (books by this author) born in Prague (1875), who made a career as a poet by seducing a series of rich noblewomen who would support him while he wrote his books. One princess let him live for a while in her Castle Duino near Trieste, a medieval castle with fortified walls and an ancient square tower. Rilke's room had a view of the gulf of Trieste, which he loved. In a letter from his room he wrote, "I am looking out into the empty sea-space, directly into the universe, you might say."

It was that winter of 1912, alone in the castle, that Rilke later said he heard the voice of an angel speaking to him about the meaning of life and death, and he started a poem that began with the lines, "And if I cried, who'd listen to me in those angelic / orders? Even if one of them suddenly held me / to his heart, I'd vanish in his overwhelming / presence. Because beauty's nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, / and we adore it because of the serene scorn / it could kill us with. Every angel's terrifying."

Rilke wrote two poems about angels in almost a single sitting, and he knew that he had begun his most important work, but then he got stuck. He eventually left the castle, the First World War broke out, and he struggled to write anything for the next decade, while he was slowly beginning to suffer the symptoms of leukemia. Finally, in February of 1922, he managed to finish in a single month what he'd started a decade before. The result was a cycle of 10 long poems that he called The Duino Elegies, about the difference between angels and people, and the meaning of death, and his idea that human beings are put on earth in order to experience the beauty of ordinary things.

In the Ninth Elegy, Rilke wrote "Maybe we're here only to say: house, / bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window — / at most, pillar, tower... but to say them, remember, / oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves / never dreamed of existing so intensely."

It's the birthday of British writer Samuel Butler, (books by this author) born in Nottinghamshire, England (1835), who was famous in his lifetime for a satire inspired by Charles Darwin's ideas called Erewhon (1872). But after he died, an incomplete novel called The Way of All Flesh was found in his desk drawer. It was published in 1903, and it became a sensation. It's the story of a priest name Ernest Pontifex, who falls into a series of scandals when he gives his money to a pregnant maid and then mistakes a respectable lady for a prostitute. After its publication, all Butler's notebooks and memoirs were published, and he suddenly became known as a great Victorian writer.

The writer V.S. Pritchett said, "The Way of All Flesh is one of the time-bombs of literature. One thinks of it lying in Samuel Butler's desk for 30 years, waiting to blow up the Victorian family and with it the whole great pillared and balustraded edifice of the Victorian novel."

Samuel Butler said, "There is one thing certain, namely, that we can have nothing certain; therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain."

Poem: "Failure" by Philip Schultz, from Failure. © Harcourt, Inc, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Failure

To pay for my father's funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can't remember
a nobody's name, that's why
they're called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
The rabbi who read a stock eulogy
about a man who didn't belong to
or believe in anything
was both a failure and a nobody.
He failed to imagine the son
and wife of the dead man
being shamed by each word.
To understand that not
believing in or belonging to
anything demanded a kind
of faith and buoyancy.
An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father's business failures—
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis—
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand. Indeed,
my father was comical.
His watches pinched, he tripped
on his pant cuffs and snored
loudly in movies, where
his weariness overcame him
finally. He didn't believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the essayist and novelist Joan Didion, (books by this author) born in Sacramento, California (1934), who made her name with a series of bleak essays about contemporary life in the 1960s and '70s, collected in the books Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1967), The White Album (1979), and The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Joan Didion said, "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does... Writers are always selling somebody out."

It's the birthday of the essayist and humorist Calvin Trillin, (books by this author) born in Kansas City, Missouri (1935), who started out working for the religion section of Time magazine, which he did not like. He said, "I finally got out of that by prefixing everything with 'alleged.' I'd write about 'the alleged parting of the Red Sea,' even 'the alleged Crucifixion,' and eventually they let me go."

In 1967, Trillin began writing a regular column for The New Yorker magazine called "U.S. Journal," which he saw as a chance to write about ordinary people who didn't usually get covered in the national press. As a result of traveling so much Trillin began eating in a variety of local restaurants, and at a time when most food writers focused on gourmet food from France, Trillin wrote about barbecue ribs in the Midwest. His first collection of food writing was American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater (1974), in which he declared that the top four or five restaurants in the world are in Kansas City. His most recent book is his memoir About Alice (2006).

It's the birthday of the mystery novelist James Lee Burke, (books by this author) born in Houston, Texas (1936). He's best known for his series of detective novels featuring Dave Robicheaux, an ex-New Orleans policeman, Vietnam veteran, and recovering alcoholic. The first novel in the series was The Neon Rain (1987) and the most recent, The Tin Roof Blowdown, came out this past summer (2007). Burke said, "I believe that whatever degree of talent I possess is a gift and must be treated as such. To misuse one's talent, to be cavalier about it, to set it aside because of fear or sloth is unpardonable."

It's the birthday of writer John Berendt, (books by this author) born in Syracuse, New York (1939). He was an editor at Esquire magazine when he took a trip to Savannah, Georgia, on a whim. He fell in love with the place and decided he wanted to write a book about it, and the result was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994), which broke the record for consecutive weeks on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. It's believed to have increased tourism in Savannah by almost 50 percent.

Poem: "Grandma's Grave" by Freya Manfred, from Swimming With a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle (buy now) © Red Dragonfly Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission

Grandma's Grave

Mother and I brush long drifts of snow from the gravestones
of my great grandfather and grandmother, great uncle and aunt,
two of mother's brothers, each less than a year old,
and her last-born brother, George Shorba, dead at sixteen:
                   1925-1942
      A Mastermind. My Beloved Son.
But we can't find the grave of Grandma, who buried all the rest.

Mother stands dark-browed and musing, under the pines,
and I imagine her as a child, wondering why her mother
left home so often to tend the sick, the dying, the dead.
Borrowing a shovel, she digs, until she uncovers:
                   1889 — 1962
                   Mary Shorba

Mother almost never cries, but she does now. She stares
at this stone as if it were the answer to all the hidden things.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is the anniversary of two terrible explosions: the Monongah Mining Disaster and the Halifax Explosion. The Monongah Disaster took place at about 10:00 in the morning on this day in 1907 in Monongah, West Virginia. An explosion in the mine shook the ground as far as eight miles away. Nearby buildings were destroyed, streetcars were knocked over, and people in the local town were thrown to the ground. In all, 362 men and boys died from the explosion and the cave in. It was the worst mining disaster in American history.

And it was on this day in 1917 that an accidental explosion destroyed a quarter of the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was the height of World War I, and Halifax was serving as an important port city for many of the ships carrying supplies for the battlefront. One of the ships coming into the port that day was a French supply ship called the Mont Blanc, carrying 200 tons of TNT, 2300 tons of other explosives, as well as ten tons of cotton, and thirty-five tons of highly flammable chemicals stored in vats on the ship's upper deck. On its way into port, the Mont Blanc collided with a Norwegian freighter, which started a fire, and the crew of the Mont Blanc piled into lifeboats and then paddled frantically away.

The fire on the Mont Blanc drew a crowd of onlookers along the shore of the channel. The docks filled with spectators, trams slowed down, people stood at office windows and on factory roofs to see the blaze. Then, a few minutes after the fire had started, the Mont Blanc exploded. It was the single most powerful man-made explosion at that point in human history.

The blast wave of water hit the shore, sweeping away buildings, bridges, roads, vehicles, and people. City streets split open. Houses, churches, schools, and factories collapsed. Virtually every building in the city had its windows broken. About a quarter of the city, was completely destroyed. More than 2,000 people were killed and more than 9,000 were injured. It was the worst disaster of any kind in Canadian history.

One of the only people who had known about the cargo of the ship was a dispatcher at the yardmaster's office. As soon as he'd realized what was happening, he began telegraphing warnings around the city, and he kept sending out warnings even though he knew that an explosion could come at any minute. He died at his post.

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, (books by this author) born in Middlesex, England (1893), whose first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), was about a woman who makes a deal with the Devil and becomes a witch in order to get away from her restrictive family. The novel became the first-ever Book of the Month Club selection, and it was a best-seller in the United States.

It's the birthday of poet (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer, (books by this author) born in New Brunswick, New Jersey (1886), who wrote the famous poem "Trees," which begins, "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree" and ends with the lines, "Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree."

It's the birthday of lyricist Ira Gershwin, born Israel Gershvin on the East Side of New York City (1896). He's considered one of the great lyricists of the 20th century, best known for writing the lyrics to songs like "I've Got Rhythm" (1930) and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" (1937).

It's the birthday of photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, born in a part of Prussia that is now Tczew, Poland (1898). He was just over five feet tall, so people never noticed him, and he was often able to capture surprising moments between real people. It was he who took the famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse at the end of World War II.

It's the birthday of a novelist important to Canadian history, Susannah Moodie, (books by this author) born Susannah Strickland in Suffolk, England (1803). As a young woman, she went with her husband to live in the backwoods of Canada, which she thought would be exciting. But in fact the winters were horrific, and the work was unending. Moodie decided that someone needed to write about the reality of pioneer life to warn other people away from it. But in the course of writing about her experiences, she found that she actually loved her adopted country. The result was her book Roughing It in the Bush (1852), which became a classic of early Canadian literature, and it's now read by most children in Canada, the way most American children read Little House in the Big Woods.

Poem: "Snow" by Anne Sexton, from The Awful Rowing Toward God. © Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Reprinted with permission. (but now)

Snow

Snow,
blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it.
Someone once said:
Don't bite till you know
if it's bread or stone.
What I bite is all bread,
rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky, (books by this author) born in Philadelphia (1928), who started out as a linguist at a time when most linguists believed that language is something children only learn through habit and practice. But Chomsky believed that language was instinctive in human beings, and in his book Syntactic Structures (1957), he developed a way of describing grammatical elements of all languages to show that there is a universal grammar innate to the human brain. His ideas revolutionized the field, making him the foremost linguist in the world.

But today, he's better known for his radical political ideas. He first got involved in politics during the Vietnam War, helping to organize the protest march on the Pentagon that Norman Mailer wrote about in his book Armies of the Night. Chomsky and Mailer ended up sharing a jail cell after the march, and Mailer described him as "a slim, sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity."

He still writes about linguistics, but he's also written books about American foreign policy, including Manufacturing Consent (1986) and Deterring Democracy (1991).

It's the birthday of the novelist Willa Cather, (books by this author)born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia (1873). Her family moved west when she was a little girl, to get away from a tuberculosis epidemic that had killed all of her father's brothers. Cather always remembered the journey out to the plains, sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on to the side to steady herself. She said, "As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything — it was a kind of erasure of personality. I would not know how much a child's life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron." Her family settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and she fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky."

She went on to write a series of novels about the pioneer life of her childhood, including O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Willa Cather said, "I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do."

It was on this day in 1941 that Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. That morning soldiers at Pearl Harbor were learning how to use their new radar technology, and they detected a large number of planes heading toward them. They telephoned an officer to ask him what to do. The officer said they must be American B-17s on their way to the base, and he told the soldiers not to worry about it.

The Japanese bombers began their attack at 7:48 a.m., with two waves of 360 planes, beginning with slow torpedo bombers and then dive-bombers. Many of the soldiers there that day woke up to the sound of alarms and explosions. Most of the damage occurred in the first 30 minutes. The U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized, and the California, Nevada, and West Virginia sank in shallow water. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed, killing more than 1,500 soldiers aboard. When nurses arrived for morning duty they found hundreds of injured men all over the base. The nurses ran around, administering morphine, and to prevent overdoses, they wrote the letter M on each treated man's forehead.

There were ultimately 2,390 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor and 1,178 wounded. FDR used the event as the grounds for entering World War II.

Poem: "My Daughter at 14: Christmas Dance" by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, from Winter Light. © Chantry Press, 1985. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

My Daughter at 14: Christmas Dance

Panic in your face, you write questions
to ask him. When he arrives,
you are serene, your fear
unbetrayed. How unlike me you are.

After the dance,
I see your happiness; he holds
your hand. Though you barely speak,
your body pulses messages I can read

all too well. He kisses you goodnight,
his body moving toward yours, and yours
responding. I am frightened, guard my
tongue for fear my mother will pop out

of my mouth. "He is not shy." You giggle,
a little girl again, but you tell me he
kissed you on the dance floor. "Once?"
I ask. "No, a lot."

We ride through the rain-shining 1 A.M.
streets. I bite back words which long
to be said, knowing I must not shatter your
moment, fragile as a spun-glass bird,

you, the moment, poised on the edge of
flight, and I, on the ground, afraid.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the travel writer Bill Bryson, (books by this author) born in Des Moines (1952), whose most recent book is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), a memoir about his childhood. Bill Bryson said, "Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines."

It's the birthday of the humorist James Thurber, (books by this author) born in Columbus, Ohio (1894). He started submitting humor pieces to The New Yorker in 1926, when the magazine was barely a year old. He said, "My pieces came back so fast I began to believe The New Yorker must have a rejection machine." But he finally published a piece about a man who sets the world record for laps inside a revolving door, and not long after that the editor, Harold Ross, offered him a job.

Thurber wanted to be a staff writer, but Ross hired him instead as an administrative editor. For the first two months on the job, Thurber worked seven days a week, editing factual copy for all the most boring parts of the magazine. He hated the job, so he started making mistakes on purpose, hoping that Ross would demote him. When that didn't work, he started submitting his own pieces without Ross's knowledge.

One day Ross barged into his office and said he'd found out Thurber had been writing for the magazine in secret. Ross said, "I don't know how you found time to write. I admit I didn't want you to. I could hit a dozen writers from here with this ashtray. They're undependable... [but] if you're a writer, write! Maybe you've got something to say." So Thurber became a staff writer and began sharing an office with E. B. White.

In addition to writing, Thurber was constantly doodling on pieces of paper and throwing them away, and he liked to fill up all the pages of office memo pads with sketches and then put them back on the shelf, in hopes of driving someone crazy. It was E.B. White who suggested that Thurber's drawings be published in the magazine, and Thurber went on to include drawings in many of his books.

Thurber is best known for his short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1944), about a man who imagines he is a soldier, a deadly marksman, a world-famous surgeon, and a condemned man facing a firing squad, all while running errands for his overbearing wife. The word "Mitty" is now defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "An ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs."

It's the birthday of the novelist Mary Gordon, (books by this author) born in Far Rockaway, New York (1940), whose hero when she was a girl was her father, a writer who taught her to write poems and stories and took her to the New York City Public Library every Saturday. But he had a heart attack when she was seven years old, and she later said, "When my father died, it was like all lights went out."

Gordon went on to write several novels, including Final Payments (1978) and Men and Angels (1985), and in each one there was usually a character based on her father. Finally, she decided to write a book about his life. But once she began to do some research, she realized that she'd grown up thinking he was a Harvard graduate, but in fact he'd never passed 10th grade. She'd always thought he was a writer, but in fact he was a publisher of pornography magazines. She remembered him going to work in the city every day, but in fact her mother had supported the family. Gordon wrote about the experience of investigating her father in the memoir The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father (1996). She said that she resents the lies her father told her about his life, but she believes that if she hadn't believed his lies, she would probably never have become a writer. She said, "The myth of my father gave me courage."

Poem: "On His Blindness" by by John Milton. Public Domain. (buy now)

On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent,
      Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
      And that one talent which is death to hide
      Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
      My true account, lest he returning chide,
      'Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?'
      I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: 'God doth not need
      Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
      Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
      And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
      They also serve who only stand and wait.'

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of John Milton, (books by this author) born in London (1608), who started writing poetry as a young man, but before his career as a poet could really take off, England began to fall into a civil war, the king was overthrown and a new form of government, known as the Commonwealth was established, led by Oliver Cromwell.

Milton responded to the situation by becoming a pamphleteer. Nobody really knew how the new government would work, and Milton became an advocate for greater civil rights and religious liberty. He wrote about expanding the right to divorce your spouse and he made one of the first comprehensive arguments for the freedom of the press. The Parliament had recently passed a law requiring government approval of all published books. Milton wrote, "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye."

Milton eventually took a job as a Latin secretary for the government, translating letters for international correspondence. He was struggling to raise his three daughters, and he was slowly going blind. Then, suddenly, the government he worked for fell apart, King Charles II was restored to the throne, and all the leaders of the Commonwealth were hanged. That summer, a warrant was issued for Milton's arrest, but he was kept in hiding by his friends. His pamphlets were publicly burned. He was eventually pardoned, but he became an outcast, and people said that God had struck him blind for his sins against the king.

Milton was devastated by the restoration of the monarchy, but without a job, he finally had time to devote to his poetry again. He'd long thought that there needed to be an epic poem in English, and he had originally thought it would be about England. But instead, he decided to write the poem about the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and humanity's fall from grace.

He composed the verses in his head, at night, and in the morning he would recite them to anyone near by that would take dictation. He originally called the poem "Adam Unparadised," but he changed the title to Paradise Lost. There was some question as to whether it would be approved for publication by the government, since Milton was such a notorious dissident, but it finally came out in 1667. It begins: "Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, / Sing Heav'nly Muse..."

When the poem appeared in print, Milton's contemporaries were astonished. People couldn't believe that a man generally thought of as a washed-up, outcast, political hack had written the greatest work of literature in a generation. The poet John Dryden wrote, "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too." Milton was 58 years old, and he'd finally become a respected poet.

Browse Poems by:

• Title
• Author
• Date