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Gallery

dames élégantes dans une clairière forestière

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  Portrait de Madame Pascal, 1871

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  Ladies in a Garden, 1870

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  Bouquet, ca. 1875

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  As You Like It

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  Fete Champetre

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  Flower Still Life, 1875

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  Seascape Near Marseille, 1880, São Paulo Museum of Art

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  Scène de parc, femmes, enfants et chiens

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Today is the birthday of Katherine Mansfield (Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; Wellington, New Zealand 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923 Fontainebleau, France); modernist writer. She wrote short stories and poetry. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917 and she died aged 34.  She was the daughter of a successful businessman who sent her away to school in England. At 18, her parents brought her back to New Zealand, and she found that she no longer had anything in common with her family.

She became one of the wildest bohemians in New Zealand. She had affairs with men and women, lived with Aborigines, and published scandalous stories. She moved back to London and lived in the bohemian scene there. she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. At one point, she married a man she barely knew and left him before the wedding night was over because she couldn’t stand the pink bedspread.

She didn’t begin to write the stories that made her famous until her younger brother came to see her in 1915. They had long talks, reminiscing about growing up in New Zealand. He left that fall for World War I and was killed two months later. She was devastated by his death, and she wrote a series of short stories about her childhood, including “The Garden Party,” which many critics consider to be her masterpiece.

She said;

Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare fiddle?

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools. With mushrooms it is so simple — you salt them well, put them aside and have patience. But with love, you have no sooner lighted on anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to it than you are perfectly certain it is not only a genuine specimen, but perhaps the only genuine mushroom ungathered.

• “Love and Mushrooms,” journal entry (1917), published in More Extracts from a Journal, ed. J. Middleton Murry, in The Adelphi (1923), p. 1068

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  E. E. Cummings
  E. E. Cummings in 1953

  And today is the birthday of Edward Estlin “E. E.” Cummings (Cambridge, Massachusetts; October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962 Madison, New Hampshire), often stylized as e e cummings (in the style of some of his poems—see name and capitalization below); poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompassed approximately 2,900 poems; two autobiographical novels; four plays; and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as an eminent voice of 20th-century English literature.

  Cummings was married briefly twice, first to Elaine Orr, then to Anne Minnerly Barton.  His longest relationship lasted more than three decades, a common-law marriage to Marion Morehouse.

  Cummings’s first marriage, Orr, began as a love affair in 1918 while she was still married to Scofield Thayer, one of Cummings’s friends from Harvard.  During this time he wrote a good deal of his erotic poetry.  After divorcing Thayer, Elaine married Cummings on March 19, 1924.  However, the couple separated after only two months of marriage and divorced less than nine months later.

  Cummings married his second wife, Barton, on May 1, 1929.  They separated three years later in 1932.  That same year, Anne obtained a Mexican divorce; it was not officially recognized in the United States until August 1934.

  In 1934, after his separation from his second wife, Cummings met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer.  Although it is not clear whether the two were ever formally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings in a common-law marriage until his death in 1962.

  Verse

   All in green went my love riding
  on a great horse of gold
  into the silver dawn.

  • Tulips and Chimneys (1923) IV
• somewhere i have never travelled,
• gladly beyond
  any experience, your eyes have their silence.
  in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
  or which i cannot touch because they are too near
• your slightest look easily will unclose me
  though i have closed myself as fingers,
  you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
  (touching skilfully,mysteriously)
• her first rose
• or if it be your wish to close me, i and
  my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
  as the heart of this flower imagines
  the snow carefully everywhere descending;
• nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
  the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
  compels me with the colour of its countries
  rendering death and forever with each breathing
  • W [ViVa] (1931) LVII
• • (i do not know what it is about you that closes
    and opens;
  • only something in me understands
    the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
    nobody,not even the rain,
  • has such small hands
    • W [ViVa] (1931) LVII

  Why do you paint?
  For exactly the same reason I breathe.
  That’s not an answer.
  There isn’t any answer.
  How long hasn’t there been any answer?
  As long as I can remember.
  And how long have you written?
  As long as I can remember.
  I mean poetry.
  So do I.

  • “Forward to an Exhibit: II” (1945)

  • Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy.
    Easy?
    Of course—you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands.
    I never met him.
    Who?
    Everybody.
    Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting?
    I am.
    Pardon me?
    I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational.
    Not all painting.
    No: housepainting is representational.
    And what does a housepainter represent?
    Ten dollars an hour.
    In other words, you don’t want to be serious—
    It takes two to be serious.
    • “Forward to an Exhibit: II” (1945)

  milly befriended a stranded star
  whose rays five languid fingers were;

  and molly was chased by a horrible thing
  which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:

  and

  may came home with a smooth round stone
  as small as a world and as large as alone

  for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
  it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

  • “maggie and milly and molly and may” in Complete Poems: 1904-1962

  wholly to be a fool
  while Spring is in the world

  my blood approves,
  and kisses are a better fate
  than wisdom

  • Four VII

  • life’s not a paragraph
    And death i think is no parenthesis
    • Four VII

  50 Poems (1940)

  • Women and men (both little and small)
    cared for anyone not at all
    they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
    sun moon stars rain…
    all by all and deep by deep
    and more by more they dream their sleep
    • 29

  • my father moved through dooms of love
    through sames of am through haves of give
    singing each morning out of each night
    my father moved through depths of height
    • 34

  • and nothing quite so least as truth
    —i say though hate were why men breathe—
    because my father lived his soul
    love is the whole and more than all
    • 34

  • love is the every only god
    • 38

  • love is more thicker than forget
    …it is more sane and sunly
    and more it cannot die
    than all the sky which only
    is higher than the sky
    • 42

  • measureless our pure living complete love
    whose doom is beauty and its fate to grow
    • 50

  • on forever’s very now we stand
    • 50

  XAIPE (1950)

  • out of the mountain of his soul
    comes a keen pure silence
    • 19

  • blossoming are people…
    all the earth has turned to sky
    …and i am you are i am we
    • 32

  • i feel that
  • (false and true are merely to know)
    Love only has ever been,
  • is,
  • and will ever be,
  • So
    • 33

  • i thank You God for most this amazing
    day:
  • for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
    and a blue true dream of sky;
  • and for everything
    which is natural which is infinite which is yes
    • 65 – This poem was used by Eric Whitacre for an a capella SATB chorus titled “i thank you God”.

  • i who have died am alive again today,
    and this is the sun’s birthday;
  • this is the birth
    day of life and of love and wings:
  • and of the gay
    great happening illimitably earth
  • • 65

  • how should tasting touching hearing seeing
    breathing any — lifted from the no
    of all nothing — human merely being
    doubt unimaginable You?
    • 65

  • now the ears of my ears awake and
    now the eyes of my eyes are opened
    • 65

  • —the great my darling happens to be
    that love are in we, that love are in we
    • 66

  • completely dare
    be beautiful
    • 68

  • more each particular person is
  • (my love)
    alive than every world can understand
    and now you are and i am now and we’re
    a mystery that will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before—
    and shining this our now must come to then
    • 69

  73 poems (1963)

  • seeker of truth
    follow no path
    all paths lead where
    truth is here
    • 3

  • it’s love by whom (my beautiful friend) the gift to live is without until:
    …love was and shall be this only truth (a dream of a deed, born not to die)
    • 4

  • it’s so damn sweet when Anybody—
    …makes you feel
    …for once
    (imag
    -ine) You
    • 7

  • because it’s
  • Spring
    thingS
  • dare to do people
    • 10

  • a great
    man
    is
    gone.
  • Tall as the truth was who; and
    wore his
    … life
    like a …
    sky.
    • 14

  • they flock and they flee through the thunder of seem
    though the stars in their silence
    say Be.
    • 29

  • the cunning the craven
    … they live for until
    though the sun in his heaven
    says Now
    • 29

  • they work and they pray
    and they bow to a must
    though the earth in her splendor
    says May
    • 29

  • without any doubt he was
    whatever
  • (first and last)
  • most people fear most:
    a mystery for which iv’e
    no word except alive
    • 30

  • Most
  • people have been heard
    screaming for international
    measures that render hell rational—
  • i thank heaven somebody’s crazy
    enough to give me a daisy
    • 30

  • we sans love equals mob
    • 31

  • unbeing
  • dead isn’t being
  • alive
    • 31

  • all which isn’t singing is mere talking
    …
    and all talking’s to oneself alone
    but the very song of
  • (as mountains
    feel and lovers)
  • singing is silence
    • 32

  • hugest whole creation may be less
    incalculable than a single kiss
    • 37

  • now I lay me down to dream of
  • (nothing
    i or any somebody or you
    can begin to begin to imagine)
  • something which nobody may keep.
    • 44

  • the axis of the universe
    —love
    • 73

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