I Used to Know That_ Stuff You Forgot From School - Caroline Taggart [15]
☞ ROBERT FROST (1874-1963, American)
Probably second only to Whitman as “the great American poet,” Frost won the Pulitzer Prize three times. His works include “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (And miles to go before I sleep) and “The Road Not Taken” (Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by).
☞ HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)
He is known for his lyric poetry—“Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Evangeline,” and “The Song of Hiawatha” (By the shore of Gitche Gumee, which, incidentally, is Lake Superior). Hiawatha may be the most mocked and parodied poem of all time, receiving reconstruction from agents such as Lewis Carroll (“Hiawatha’s Photographing”) and the producers of Saturday Night Live.
☞ WALT WHITMAN (1819-92, American)
The great American poet of the 19th century. His master-work is Leaves of Grass, a massive collection of short poems, including “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” both from the section “Memories of President Lincoln,” inspired by the president’s assassination.
International Authors
Most of us had teachers of English or general studies who encouraged us to broaden our horizons by reading some of the foreign “greats” in translation. Keeping this to a Top 10 has meant cheating a bit on the Greek tragedians and leaving out Horace, Ovid, Rabelais, Molière, Schiller, Balzac, Zola… and that’s before I really hit the 20th century. But I think these are the ones you are most likely to have read without knowing the original language.
☞ DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321, Italian)
Known for The Divine Comedy, Dante divided his epic into three parts: Inferno (Hell), Purgatoria, and Paradiso. It narrates Dante’s journey through these three worlds, the first two guided by Virgil, the final by Beatrice, a woman with whom he had been madly in love since he was nine, although it seems they met only twice. Hell is depicted as having various circles, indicating degrees of suffering, depending on how bad you had been in life: the ninth and worst contained the poets.
☞ MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547-1616, Spanish)
One of the most influential works of Spanish literature is Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The novel is about a man who becomes obsessed with books on chivalry and decides to go out into the world to do noble deeds. Toward this end, he imagines that a local village girl is the glamorous lady in whose name these deeds will be carried out, and he christens her Dulcinea del Toboso. His steed is actually a broken-down old horse called Rosinante, which means “previously a broken-down old horse.” Along with other foolish whims, he adopts Sancho Panza as his squire and goes around attacking windmills because he thinks they are giants.
☞ FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (1821-81, Russian)
Often credited as a founder of 20th-century existentialism, Dostoevsky graduated as a military engineer. However, he soon resigned that career, began writing, and joined a group of utopian socialists. He was arrested and sentenced to death, but the punishment was commuted and he spent eight years in hard labor and as a soldier. His best-known works include Crime and Punishment, an account of an individual’s fall and redemption, The Brothers Karamazov, a tale of four brothers involved in their father’s brutal murder.
☞ GUSTAV FLAUBERT (1821-80, French)
One of the most important novels of the 19th century, Madame Bovary was attacked for its obscenity when it was published more than 150 years ago. The novel focuses on Madame Bovary—Emma—who is married to a worthy but dull provincial doctor, Charles. She longs for glamour and passion and has adulterous affairs, rebelling