A Dream Within a Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?


"A Dream Within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe. Public domain. (buy now)

On this day in 1643 the first legal divorce recorded in the American colonies was finalized. Anne Clarke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had petitioned for divorce from her estranged and adulterous husband, Dennis Clarke. Mr. Clarke admitted to abandoning his wife and two children for another woman, and confirmed that he would not return to the marriage. The court’s record read: “She is garunted to bee divorced.”

It’s the birthday of the poet W.D. (William DeWitt) Snodgrass born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania (1926) (books by this author). He was studying poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the early 1950s when his marriage began to fall apart, and he began writing about it in his poems. He showed some of these personal poems to his teacher, the poet Robert Lowell, but Lowell didn’t like them. He said, “You’ve got a brain; you can’t write this kind of tear-jerking stuff.”

Lowell later recanted and helped Snodgrass get his poetry collection, Heart’s Needle, published in 1959. It was Snodgrass’s first book, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. Lowell called it “a breakthrough for modern poetry.”

Snodgrass’s work helped inspire a whole new school of poetry in which American poets began to write openly about their personal lives for the first time in decades. Snodgrass has since been called one of the founders of confessional poetry, but he said, “The term confessional seems to imply either that I’m concerned with religious matters (I am not) or that I’m writing some sort of bedroom memoir (I hope I’m not).”

But in defense of writing personal poems, Snodgrass said: “The only reality which [a poet] can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being. … If he pretties it up, if he changes its meaning, if he gives it the voice of any borrowed authority, if in short he rejects this reality, his mind will be less than alive. So will his words.”

It’s the birthday of author Ngugi wa Thiong’o (books by this author), born James Ngugi in Limuru, Kenya (1938). The 1960s were productive years for Ngugi. He produced his first play, The Black Hermit, in 1962 while still in college; in 1964, he published the first East African novel written in English. That book is Weep Not, Child, and it’s based on his family’s troubles during the Mau Mau Uprising. He published The River Between (1965) a year later, and A Grain of Wheat in 1967. Around this time, he changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiong’o to reflect his Kikuyu heritage, and he stopped writing in English.

He was sent to a maximum-security prison in 1977 for the overtly political play I Will Marry When I Want, and while he was there, he wrote Devil on the Cross (1980), the first novel in the Gikuyu language. He was denied paper, so he wrote the novel on prison toilet paper. In 1982, he was packing to return home from a book launch in London when he found out the Moi dictatorship in Kenya was plotting to kill him. He suddenly found himself an exile. “At first I would only use the word shipwrecked, not exile, to refer to my situation; shipwrecks end with rescue, right?” he later wrote. “I did not unpack the suitcase. Seven years later the suitcase was still packed.” He eventually settled in the United States and has taught at Yale and the University of California – Irvine. Four of his children are published authors.

In 2010, he published a memoir called Dreams in the Time of War about his childhood in a Kikuyu compound outside of Nairobi, and  Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening (2016). It’s about his university days in Uganda, where he found his writerly and political voice.

It’s the birthday of Stella Gibbons (1902) (books by this author). She was born in London,

and earned a degree in journalism in 1923. The author of many short stories and novels.

She worked at the Evening Standard, where one of her duties was to summarize the romance novels of Mary Webb and similar authors, which were being serialized in the paper. Gibbons had to recap the installments that had gone before, for the readers who might have missed a segment or come late to the story. She was not a fan of the genre. In 1930, she took a job writing for Lady, “the magazine for gentlewomen.” It was in her small office in Covent Garden that she wrote her first and most famous novel in her spare time: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), a parody of Webb’s style.

And it’s the birthday of Italian novelist Umberto Eco (1932) (books by this author), the bespectacled, bearded semiotics scholar who wrote a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery called Il nome della rosa or, The Name of the Rose (1980). Nobody expected much from a mystery filled with biblical references, discussions of Christian theology and heresies, and a medieval setting, but the book became an international best-seller and later a movie starring Sean Connery. Umberto Eco said simply, “People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.”

Eco’s other books include The Island of the Day Before (1994) and The Prague Cemetery (2011). His novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) took eight years to write and was sprinkled liberally with references to Kabbalah, alchemy, and conspiracy theory.

He tended to rewrite the same passages over and over. About his writing habits, he said, “Before I sit down to write, I am deeply happy.” He died in February of 2016.

When asked if he’d enjoy living in the Middle Ages, where so many of his books were set, Umberto Eco answered: “I suspect that if I lived in the Middle Ages my feelings about the period would be dramatically different. I’d rather just imagine it.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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