Just a bit of Motherly Insight!
Mark Twain declared on several occasions that he hated poetry:
“I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.”
– Mark Twain’s Liverpool Speech on 7/10/1907
“I shall not write poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.”
– Mark Twain’s newspaper column in the Buffalo Express in 1869
“My usual style of ciphering out the merits of poetry, which is to read a line or two near the top, a verse near the bottom and then strike an average…”
– “Answers to Correspondents,” by Mark Twain
Hmm…, you don’t say?
In many situations, taking an express route or shortcut is not wise. If you read my last post, It’s a Pensive Pondering Puzzle, you know I think all good mothers would send children who take shortcuts or harm a brother or sister to rise, back where they misstepped to try again. I proffer that’s how Mark Twain’s cynicism on poets and poetry was revised:
“What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought!… Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.“
– Mark Twain’s letter to W.D. Howells, 2/25/1906
As a Poet and a Mother, I would say that some lessons are harder than other lessons. But a well-learned lesson is worth the while.
Just a bit of Motherly Insight!
Earnest Hemingway erroneously declared,
“all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Fin.”
– Earnest Hemingway, 1935
Oh, Really?
I dare say while Earnest made an earnest attempt to put his thoughts into words, he lacked some depth perception. It seems what he was trying to relay was that the characters in the book display the embodiment of the American Spirit.
I believe by looking to God (one foundation of love- two whole minds who can unite and share thoughts and dreams), all will find precisely where all literature circles back to. It appears Mark Twain stepped in the path of the Divine, who dumped creativity juice on him, and he ran with it, growing his brain pathways.
Just a bit of Motherly insight.
Photo of a woman by Josiah Lewis on Unsplash
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
LORD MAYOR’S DINNER, TOWN HALL, LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND – “BEGUM OF BENGAL“
PUBLISHED IN MARK TWAIN SPEAKING, PP. 577-583.
MCCULLOUGH, JOSEPH B. “A LISTING OF MARK TWAIN’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE BUFFALO “EXPRESS,” 1869-1871.” AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM, 1870-1910 5, NO. 1 (1972): 61-70. ACCESSED FEBRUARY 26, 2021. HTTP://WWW.JSTOR.ORG/STABLE/27747796.