(Excerpt from The House of a Hundred Lights
The world's g...)
Excerpt from The House of a Hundred Lights
The world's great rule is, Give and take and, so that Custom may not smother, I'll give Doubt freely with one hand and take Faith freely by the other.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
(Excerpt from Abelard and Heloise
He begins to select fro...)
Excerpt from Abelard and Heloise
He begins to select from her basket. Enter from street J ehanne listlessly crying her wares.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
(Excerpt from El Dorado: A Tragedy
I'll summon shapes str...)
Excerpt from El Dorado: A Tragedy
I'll summon shapes struck with a grief so black That earth seemed fire, the sea a cloud of fear, Fate seemed an idiot scrawling on the sand.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams Simon the Cyrenian Plays for a Negro Theater
(This book an EXACT reproduction of the original book publ...)
This book an EXACT reproduction of the original book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR?d book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
Frederic Ridgely Torrence was an American poet, and editor.
Background
Frederic was born on November 27, 1874 in Xenia, Ohio, the first of three children of Findley David Torrence, a lumber dealer, Civil War veteran, and descendant of one of the town's earliest Scots-Irish settlers, and Mary (Ridgely) Torrence, who had come to Xenia from Maryland, orphaned, at twelve.
Education
Save for a two-year sojourn in California, Ridgely (as he was known) spent his boyhood in Xenia, where he received his schooling.
His father, for example, saved Ridgely's writings during his college years at Miami University in Ohio (1893 - 1895) and at Princeton (1895 - 1896) because he felt they provided evidence that his son was losing his mind; and when Ridgely left Princeton without graduating in December 1896 and went to New York City in search of his fortune, he wrote long and frequent letters to his family in Ohio in a vain attempt to justify to them his literary activity and liberated ways.
He was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from Miami in 1937.
Career
In New York, Torrence found work at the public library, where he remained for six years. More importantly, he met in 1899 the poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman, who gave him the encouragement and the introductions necessary to launch his literary career. Torrence first made his reputation as a poet with the publication of The House of a Hundred Lights (1899) and through representation in Stedman's An American Anthology (1900). Indeed, the British novelist May Sinclair focused her 1906 article, "Three American Poets of To-day" (Fortnightly Review, September 1906), on William Vaughn Moody, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Torrence, whose work, she said, was distinguished by his "immense, if as yet somewhat indefinite, promise. " It was a promise that remained largely unfulfilled by Torrence's two subsequent books of poetry, Hesperides (1925) and Poems (1941).
His early work is flawed by its Swinburnean ornateness, and there are simply not enough of his later, more economical, and much more accomplished poems, mostly short lyrics, to classify Torrence as anything but a minor poet.
In 1900 he had proclaimed his intention to write poetry "that above all says something, and that gives men something to chew on, " and he wrote good poems proclaiming his pacifism ("Men and Wheat, " "The Watcher") and his mysticism ("Eye-Witness").
His best poems, however, are those where an emotional invocation of a sense of loss ("The Son, " "Outline, " "The Apples") penetrates the poet's careful conventional craftsmanship.
Torrence made it his regular business, during their thirty-five-year friendship, to cheer up the melancholic E. A. R. and was faithfully at the task during Robinson's final illness.
At the turn of the century, Torrence had joined with Moody, Percy MacKaye, Josephine Preston Peabody, and Robinson in a campaign to reinvigorate the American theater through verse drama. His own early efforts in this genre, El Dorado (1903) and Abelard and Heloise (1907), were published in book form but never produced.
Nor did his subsequent prose dramas, set in his native Ohio and heavily dependent upon symbolism, reach the stage, though the distinguished actress Alla Nazimova showed an interest in The Madstone, written in 1907. But the switch to prose rhythms and the folk tales of his youth led to the three one-act Negro plays, Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, and Simon the Cyrenian, which were printed as Plays for a Negro Theatre in 1917 and performed on Broadway that same year.
They marked the first serious dramatic presentation of Negro life and opened the door for the Negro in the American theater. Inspired partly by the playwright's enthusiasm for Irish folk drama, particularly that of J. M. Synge, and partly by recollections of his black boyhood companions in Xenia, the plays presented their Negro characters as sympathetic human beings speaking a faithfully reproduced dialect of their own, and not as stereotypes. None of Torrence's poems or plays achieved commercial success, and to eke out his living he served variously as assistant editor of the Critic (1903), fiction editor of Cosmopolitan (1905 - 1907), and--most importantly--poetry editor of the New Republic (1920 - 1933), where despite his own conservative tastes and the magazine's dearth of space for verse contributions, he printed much of the best of contemporary poetry.
Torrence also served as visiting professor at Miami University and at Antioch College.
He later edited and wrote an introduction for Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1940). Torrence maintained his interest in Negro culture, and in 1948 published as his last book The Story of John Hope, a biography of the Negro educator. Two years later, on Christmas Day 1950, he died in New York City of lung cancer. He was buried in Woodland Cemetery in Xenia.
He was reared as a Presbyterian, though he later turned away from denominational Christianity. His parents, to whom he felt an abiding attachment, seem never to have understood their son.
Views
Quotations:
"I wish, " he wrote after first encountering E. A. Robinson in 1900, "I could fix some of his fixity of effort and belief into my own life. "
On his deathbed fifty years later, he lamented to his wife that he had not worked harder, accomplished more. "I have all the machinery in here that Frost has, " he once told Winfield Townley Scott, "but I lack the dynamo. "
Membership
In 1947 he was awarded a Fellowship at the Academy of American Poets.
Personality
Perhaps Torrence's greatest gift was for friendship. Tall, thin, elegant, a brilliant mimic, he could--and often did--exert great charm.
Quotes from others about the person
Stedman, who introduced the two men, had been overwhelmed by the young poet, and Torrence later became a close friend of both William Vaughn Moody and Robert Frost, who dedicated a poem to Torrence ("A Passing Glimpse") and remarked of him that "I always keep seeing a light as I talk with him--and of course losing it as quickly; the thing is seeing it. "
Connections
Torrence met through Stedman was Zona Gale, with whom he had a love affair in 1902-1903, but it was not until February 3, 1914, that Torrence married still another writer, Olivia Howard Dunbar, a New Englander and a graduate of Smith College. They had no children.