Tag Archives: poetry

Anatomy of a Stamp: Sylvia Plath

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Today we celebrate writer Sylvia Plath’s 80th birthday. Plath (1932–1963) was honored along with nine other poets on the Twentieth-Century Poets stamp sheet, which was issued earlier this year.

In depicting Plath on the stamp, art director Derry Noyes considered a couple of different options. Early in the stamp development process, Noyes worked with an artist Maira Kalman to create a colorful and lively portrait based on a picture of the artist that the U.S. Postal Service borrowed from the Special Collections library at Smith College, Plath’s alma mater. The art featured the artist’s own handwritten lines from one of Plath’s best-known poems, “Daddy”:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe

Design direction sometimes changes, however, and USPS ultimately opted to use a black-and-white photograph of Plath, as well as each of her contemporaries featured on the stamps, instead of having the poet’s portrait illustrated. USPS again chose the resources of a rich archival collection, this time working with archivists at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. There they found a picture of Plath by the talented photographer Rollie McKenna.

Twentieth-Century Poets Digital Color Postmark Keepsake

Plath’s life events and her poems are famously intertwined. Readers admire her unvarnished examination of life’s complexities, contradictions, and daily challenges, and the ways in which she expressed her own highs and lows in a raw and direct style. In the photograph, Plath sits on a sofa or chair and regards the camera’s presence obliquely, perhaps lost in thought and contemplating new verse.

McKenna’s picture of Plath was taken in 1959. Four years later, less than six months after her thirty-first birthday, Plath ended her life. McKenna’s photograph, among the many others that captured Plath’s intelligence and youthful beauty, is—like Plath’s small but potent body of writing—a touchstone for her legions of devotees.

Quoth the Raven: Feeling the Spirit of Halloween

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The Halloween season brings with it a noticeable chill in the air, moody days, longer nights, and the thrilling promise of some fun fright or another. At this time of year, we can’t help but think of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), one of America’s most masterful storytellers. Out of his vivid imagination leapt such terrifying tales as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” His “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” featuring the brilliant investigator C. Auguste Dupin, may have been the first detective story ever written.

And then, of course, there is “The Raven” (1845):

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door—
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”

So begins this remarkable poetic masterpiece. The narrator, mourning the death of the beautiful woman he loved, is seized with “fantastic terrors” at each knock. Finally, several stanzas later, he opens the door:

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the work, “Lenore!”—
Merely this and nothing more.

Another sound leads him to open the window and in steps a raven:

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

Is the raven “bird or fiend”? Will the narrator ever reunite with his “lost Lenore”? You’ll have to read the rest of the poem to find out . . .

Edgar Allan Poe was honored with a stamp in 2009. Panes of the stamp have sold out, but a block of four Poe stamps is included with Happy Halloween!

Happy Birthday to Poet Denise Levertov

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Happy birthday, Denise Levertov! One of ten poets featured on the Twentieth-Century Poets stamp sheet issued earlier this year, the award-winning Levertov was born on this day in 1923.

Levertov drew her poetry from her own experiences, and she encouraged her readers to open themselves up fully to the world, to find answers to universal questions by looking inward. As she explains in “Pleasures”:

I like to find
what’s not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.

In her poems, public and private form a single universe in which fairy tales and myths mingle with the objects and events of everyday life.

Have a favorite poem by Levertov? Join the birthday celebration and share it with us in the comments.

“Denise Levertov”, 1953
Photograph by Rollie McKenna
@ Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation
Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Foundation

E. E. Cummings versus e. e. cummings: A Stamp Mystery Solved

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How many of you expected to see poet E. E. Cummings’s name in lowercase (“e. e. cummings”) on his recently issued postage stamp? We’d wager a good number of you. After all, most of us are used to seeing his name in lowercase in all those great poetry collections. So why does his stamp look like this?

Well, we did a little research. It turns out that an editor preparing a French translation of Cummings’s poetry asked him directly about the appearance of his name in 1951:

are you E.E.Cummings, ee cummings, or what?(so far as the title page is concerned)wd u like title page all in lowercase?”

Cummings’s reply?

E.E.Cummings, unless your printer prefers E. E. Cummings/ titlepage up to you;but may it not be tricksy svp[.]

Aha! Cummings—who did not sign his name all in lowercase letters—regarded the use of his name in lowercase as a publisher’s gimmick. (You can read more about this here and here.) And, we’ve been told that when USPS asked members of his family about how the poet should be represented on the stamp, they favored “E. E. Cummings.” Mystery solved!

Do you have a stamp mystery you’d like us to solve? Send your question to uspsstamps [at] gmail [dot] com, and we’ll get right on it!

Gone With the Wind & the Books That Shaped America

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Margaret Mitchell’s epic Civil War-era novel Gone With the Wind was published on this day in 1936. The only one of her works to be published in her lifetime, the book was an instant success, earning Mitchell critical recognition and remaining a national bestseller for two years.

Much to our delight, Gone With the Wind is also included in a new exhibition that opened on June 25 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is called “Books That Shaped America,” and it aims to

spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives . . . Some of the titles on display have been the source of great controversy, even derision, in U.S. history. Nevertheless, they shaped Americans’ views of the world and the world’s views of America.

Here’s what the Library of Congress has to say about Gone With the Wind:

The most popular romance novel of all time was the basis for the most popular movie of all time (in today’s dollars). Margaret Mitchell’s book, set in the South during the Civil War, won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and it remains popular, despite charges that its author had a blind eye regarding the horrors of slavery.

Looking more closely at the exhibition’s list of books, we are very pleased to see many whose authors have appeared on U.S. postage stamps, including three (!) authors from the 2012 stamp program: poets Gwendolyn Brooks and William Carlos Williams, and Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. From the exhibition website:

  • Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville (1945)

“A Street in Bronzeville” was Brooks’s first book of poetry. It details, in stark terms, the oppression of blacks in a Chicago neighborhood. Critics hailed the book, and in 1950 Brooks became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was also appointed as U.S. Poet Laureate by the Librarian of Congress in 1985.

  • William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923)

A practicing physician for more than 40 years, William Carlos Williams became an experimenter, innovator and revolutionary figure in American poetry. In reaction against the rigid, rhyming format of 19th-century poets, Williams, his friend Ezra Pound and other early-20th-century poets formed the core of what became known as the “Imagist” movement. Their poetry focused on verbal pictures and moments of revealed truth, rather than a structure of consecutive events or thoughts and was expressed in free verse rather than rhyme.

  • Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914)

“Tarzan of the Apes” is the first in a series of books about the popular man who was raised by and lived among the apes. With its universal themes of honesty, heroism and bravery, the series has never lost popularity. Countless Tarzan adaptations have been filmed for television and the silver screen, including an animated version currently in production.

Mark Twain, whose stamp was issued in 2011, is also included in the exhibition. “Books That Shaped America” will be on view through September 29. The Gwendolyn Brooks and William Carlos Williams stamps were issued in April 2012 as part of the Twentieth-Century Poets stamps pane and are still available. The Edgar Rice Burroughs stamps will be issued on August 17, 2012, in Tarzana, California.

Anyone want to start a stamp subjects book club?!

Gone with the Wind TM, its characters and elements are trademarks of Turner Entertainment Company and the Stephens Mitchell Trusts.

Tarzan™ Owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and Used by Permission.