A Short Note on Samuel Barclay Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.
Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd".

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

Honours and awards:
Croix de guerre (France)
Médaille de la Résistance (France)
1959 honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin
1961 International Publishers' Formentor Prize (shared with Jorge Luis Borges).
1968 Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1969 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Saoi of Aosdana (Ireland)
2016 The house that Beckett lived in in 1934 (48 Paultons Square, Chelsea, London) has received an English Heritage Blue Plaque.
(Courtesy:Wikipedia)

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

 William Wordsworth (1770-1850) belongs to the first generation of the English Romantic poets. He was born on 7^th April, 1770 at Cockermouth, Cumberland in the Lake Districts of Northern England. He lost his mother only at the age of eight and his father at the age of thirteen. Thereafter he had to depend on the generosity of his relatives. He was sent to the Grammar School of Hawkshead in the heart of the Lake districts. In his boyhood he got close contact with the nature, which charmed him very much. At seventeen, he was sent to St. John’s College, Cambridge. He was a mediocre student and graduated from this college in 1791.

    

He had a great passion for travelling. During his student career, he traveled many places, including Cumberland, Yorkshire, France and Switzerland. However, he paid a second visit to France in November, 1791. The French Revolution was then at its height there and exercised a strong influence on his mind. He was filled with love and admiration for the ideals of the Revolution. But afterwards, he was greatly shocked by the bloody excesses of the Revolution. Disillusioned and depressed, he returned to England. Dorothy, his sister, accompanied him during his days of depression. She cheered him up and settled with him in a little cottage in Dorset. In 1795, he got a legacy of £900 settled upon him by a friend. It was enough to set him above want.

     In the meantime, he met S. T. Coleridge and moved to Somerset in order to live near him. He left for Germany on a visit in 1798-99. Coming back he settled in the Lake District where he met Mary Hutchinson. He married her in 1802. Then in 1813, he moved with her and sister Dorothy to Rydal Mount where he lived for the rest of his life. But for his passion for travelling, he could not stay in peace. He visited Scotland several times.

    Wordsworth began his poetic career in college life with Guilt and Sorrow (1791). While in university, he published An Evening Walk (1793). His first considerable work was the Lyrical Ballads (1798) published together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is regarded as a milestone in the history of English poetry. His other notable works are: Michael (1798), Tintern Abbey (1798), The Excursion (1814), The Prelude (1850) and the prose Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) where he supports the need for a new kind of poetry that would be closer to nature and common human experiences.

       He was offered the honorary D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Law) degree by the Oxford University in 1839. He was awarded a Civil List Pension of £300 a year in 1842. On the death of Robert Southey in 1843, he was appointed the Poet Laureate of England. He breathed his last on 23^rd April, 1850 and was buried in Grasmere churchyard.

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HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was one of the great American poets of the 19^th century. He was born at Portland, a seaport town in Maine, U.S.A. on 27 February, 1807. His father Stephen Longfellow was a lawyer and was originally from Yorkshire, England. H. W. Longfellow was the second one of eight children of his parents. He was friendly, sensitive and meritorious from his childhood. He had his early education at Portland Academy. Then he was admitted in Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 1822. At Bowdoin, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne who became his lifelong friend. After graduating from there in 1825, he made a long European tour.            

    He returned home in 1830 and became the first Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. In 1831, he married Mary Storer Potter, an intelligent and beautiful girl of Portland. But his 22 year old wife died during their trip in Rotterdam after suffering a miscarriage in 1835. When he returned to the United States in 1836, he became the Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University. Then he settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lived for the rest of his life although he liked to spend summers at his home Nahant. 

      After seven years of courtship he married Miss Frances ‘Fanny’ Appleton, the daughter of a wealthy Boston industrialist, Nathal Appleton in 1843, eight years after the death of his first wife. He resigned his professorship in 1854 to devote all his time to poetry. He was also a devoted husband. But his marriage ended in sadness. After eighteen years of happy married life, Fanny was accidentally burnt to death in 1861. Longfellow was devastated by her death and never fully recovered. He died on 24 March in 1882, after suffering from peritonitis for five years. He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

       He became one of the most popular poets of his day in America and England. He began to write and publish poetry at the age of thirteen. His first notable publication Voices of Night (1839) was a collection of poems including The Psalm of Life, The Beleaguered City and The Midnight Mass of the Dying Year. His other major collection of poems are Evangeline (1847), The Golden Legend (1851), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), Birds of Passage, etc. His poetry is based on common and easily understood themes with simple, clean and lucid language.

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