Orpheus Emerged
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to afford him salvation. Wagner was as
famous for his grandiosity, extreme egotism,
nationalism, and controversial social and
political positions (including overt anti-
Semitism). He had a strong influence on
many writers, including Baudelaire, Mann,
Joyce, and T. S. Eliot.
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Shostakovich. Russian composer
Dmitry Dmitryevich Shostakovich (1906-
1975) wrote popular orchestral works early in
his career, but then incurred the disapproval
of the Soviets for what was seen as Western
decadence. His Symphony No. 5 (1937)
regained official approval. His late work,
Symphony No. 13 (1962), aroused consider-
able controversy because the text (by Russian
poet Yevtushenko) described the Nazi slaugh-
ter of Jews at Babi Yar, and referred to contin-
uing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
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Thomas Mann. Mann (1875-1955)
wrote fiction and essays that delved into the
artistic temperament. His work is informed
by the conflict between the bourgeois world of
his family and the spiritual realm of art. This
dualism --between Geist ("spirit") and Leben ("life"); between the world of art, imagination,
and the decadent artistic personality on the
one hand and that of everyday reality, the
"straight" world of conventional society on the
other – is the driving conflict of Mann’s writ-
ings. The notion that true artists need to reject
the restrictions of "ordinary" life reflects the
influence of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and
Nietzsche.
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Burroughs.
William Seward
Burroughs (1914-1997) was a student at
Columbia University when Jack Kerouac met
him there. The scion of a rich family, he
became a heroin addict and based his first
novels -- Junk (written as William Lee and
published in 1953, then reissued as Junky in
1964) and Naked Lunch (1959) -- on his drug-
related experiences. Burroughs’ writing is
characterized by biting and hilarious satire of
contemporary society, and disjointed, phan-
tasmagorical prose.
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Prometheus. The Greek god who
stole fire from heaven and gave it to man. As
a punishment, Prometheus was chained to a
mountain; an eagle ate his liver every day, but
it grew back each night. He was eventually
rescued by Heracles.
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Blake.
English poet, engraver, painter,
and mystic William Blake (1757-1827) was a
visionary: he bypassed organized religion and
experienced God directly; his personal visions
formed his idiosyncratic mythology. His most
famous works are Songs of Innocence, Songs of
Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell.
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Prometheus. The Greek god who
stole fire from heaven and gave it to man. As
a punishment, Prometheus was chained to a
mountain; an eagle ate his liver every day, but
it grew back each night. He was eventually
rescued by Heracles.
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Orpheus. In Greek mythology, Orpheus
was a beloved musician, the son of the muse
Calliope and Apollo, and a follower of Dionysus
(the god of wine and fertile crops). He married
Eurydice, but she was killed by a snake while
fleeing the advances of Aristaeus. Orpheus
descended to Hades to find her. His playing of
the lyre so delighted Hades himself that Orpheus
was permitted to take Eurydice back with him,
provided that he did not look at her until they
arrived in the upper world. When they were
nearly there, however, he no longer heard her
behind him, and he looked back. Eurydice
returned to Hades. He could not get over the
loss of his love, and the women in his home of
Thrace were so outraged that they tore him to
pieces during a bacchanalian orgy. The pieces of
his body were collected by the Muses, and buried
at the foot of Mt. Olympus; but his head was car-
ried out to sea and eventually came ashore on
the island of Lesbos, where it became an oracle.
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Prometheus. The Greek god who
stole fire from heaven and gave it to man. As
a punishment, Prometheus was chained to a
mountain; an eagle ate his liver every day, but
it grew back each night. He was eventually
rescued by Heracles.
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Goethe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832) was a poet, playwright, novelist,
and research scientist. His early works,
including the poem "Prometheus" and the
short novel The Sorrows of Young Werther,
were associated with the pre-Romantic Sturm
und Drang school. Informing these works
was the theme that man must believe not in
gods but in himself alone. Goethe is perhaps
best known for his play, Faust (Part I, 1808;
Part II, 1832).
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Yeats. The works of the Irish poet and
dramatist William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
are characterized by the three major concerns
of his life: art, Irish nationalism, and occult
studies. He was a founding member of the
Pre-Raphaelite Rhymer’s Club (pure poetry
and aesthetics), and created the influential
Abbey Theatre in Ireland. His late poetry is
considered his greatest work, including
"Byzantium," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Easter 1916," and "Leda and the Swan."
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Orpheus. In Greek mythology, Orpheus
was a beloved musician, the son of the muse
Calliope and Apollo, and a follower of Dionysus
(the god of wine and fertile crops). He married
Eurydice, but she was killed by a snake while
fleeing the advances of Aristaeus. Orpheus
descended to Hades to find her. His playin
g of
the lyre so delighted Hades himself that Orpheus
was permitted to take Eurydice back with him,
provided that he did not look at her until they
arrived in the upper world. When they were
nearly there, however, he no longer heard her
behind him, and he looked back. Eurydice
returned to Hades. He could not get over the
loss of his love, and the women in his home of
Thrace were so outraged that they tore him to
pieces during a bacchanalian orgy. The pieces of
his body were collected by the Muses, and buried
at the foot of Mt. Olympus; but his head was car-
ried out to sea and eventually came ashore on
the island of Lesbos, where it became an oracle.
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Cocteau. Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
was at the center of modernism, and at the
vanguard of nearly every experimental artistic
movement of the first half of the 20th Century,
especially Cubism and Surrealism. (He was
closely associated with Picasso and
Stravinsky.) He was an innovator in many art
forms, including ceramics, murals, compos-
ing, poetry, drama, film, and fiction. Through
all his works runs the theme of the poet-angel,
defier of destiny and guardian of the divine in
man, who risks being lost in the disorder of
the modern world. One of his theatrical pro-
ductions, Orphee (1926), was based on the
Orpheus myth; this play was the basis of a
later film written and directed by Cocteau in
1950. (Other notable films are The Blood of
the Poet, Beauty and the Beast, and Les Enfants Terrible.)
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Joyce.
Irish novelist, poet, short-story
writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is best known
for his revolutionary novel, Ulysses. His initial collection of stories, Dubliners (1914), is set in
the beloved/despised homeland he left in
1902 at the age of twenty. His first novel, the
autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916), describes his rebellion
against his Jesuit upbringing, Catholicism,
and Irish nationalism, and the development of
his artist sensibility. He followed the sensa-
tional publication of Ulysses (1922) with the
experimental and complex Finnegans Wake
(1939), characterized by the use of a unique
language of invented words, puns, and
obscure allusions.
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Nietzsche. German philosopher, clas-
sical scholar, and poet Frederich Nietszche
(1844-1900) is noted for his theory of the uber-
mensch (“superman”). Nietszche set himself
against the systematic philosophy of the first part
of the 19th Century, particularly that of Hegel.
He tried to go beyond the rational to the irra-
tional, human level. He rejected Christianity
because he felt it directed human thought away
from this world and into the next, thereby ren-
dering man incapable of coping with the reality
of everyday life; he said that Christianity teaches
men how to die but not how to live. He went
insane in 1889, and remained so until he died a
year later.
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Dos Passos. The American writer
John Dos Passos (1896-1970), along with
Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings,
went to Europe during World War I to serve in
the Ambulance Corps. This experience went
into his first successful novel, Three Soldiers.
His next important novel, Manhattan Transfer
(1925), asserted the role of the artist as social
critic, and utilized experimental devices like
"newsreel," stream of consciousness, and cin-
ematic techniques. His next three novels --
The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money –
were published together as U.S.A. (1937).
This trilogy is noted for its use of "camera
eye," newsreel sequences, free association,
and other innovative techniques. U.S.A. is
considered Dos Passos’ masterwork: a vast
portrait of American life, with the nation itself
as protagonist.
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Henry James. American novelist,
short-story writer, and critic Henry James
(1843-1916) was a major contributor to the
great tradition of the novel, and a master
craftsman of prose. He brought his finely
honed intelligence and perception to bear in
the development of his main themes: the rela-
tionship between innocence and experience
(as exemplified by the contrasts between the
uncultured but vibrant Americans and the
cultivated but played-out Europeans; the
dilemma of the artist in an alien society; and
the difficult but crucial journey to self-knowl-
edge. His artistic output was prodigious,
including most notably the novels The Portrait
of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.
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Saroyan.
Born in California of
Armenian parents, William Saroyan (1908-
1981) wrote short stories, novels and plays
about the spiritual rootlessness of the immi-
grant. His tales exalt personal emotion and
freedom, and put forth kindness and brother-
ly love as human ideals. He won early renown
with his story collection, The Daring Young
Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), and his
play, The Time of Your Life (1939) won the
Pulitzer Prize.
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Rimbaud. French symbolist poet Arthur
Rimbaud (1854-1891) wrote hallucinatory
verse that strongly influenced the surrealists
and modern poetry in general. His best-
known works are Les Illuminations (1886), Le
Bateau ivre (1871), and Une Saison en Enfir ( A Season in Hell) (1873) – a spiritual/psychological autobiography in prose-poem form. He
broke away from a poor, religious, provincial
childhood and fled at age fifteen to Paris,
where he studied occult writings, Plato, the
kabbala, and Buddhism. He deliberately
debauched himself in order to reach a tran-
scendent world through sin and suffering. He
wrote all his published poetry before the age
of twenty.
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sical scholar, and poet Frederich Nietszche
(1844-1900) is noted for his theory of the uber-
mensch (“superman”). Nietszche set himself
against the systematic philosophy of the first part
of the 19th Century, particularly that of Hegel.
He tried to go beyond the rational to the irra-
tional, human level. He rejected Christianity
because he felt it directed human thought away
from this world and into the next, thereby ren-
dering man incapable of coping with the reality
of everyday life; he said that Christianity teaches
men how to die but not how to live. He went
insane in 1889, and remained so until he died a
year later.
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Wolfe. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was a
novelist from North Carolina whose autobio-
graphical works – Look Homeward, Angel, Of
Time and the River, The Web and the Rock, and You Can’t Go Home Again – are characterized
by intense individualism, exuberance of spirit,
extravagant rhetoric, and the mystical cele-
bration of youth, sex, and America. His four
novels – powerful, lyrical, informed with an
intense longing for some kind of faith – com-
prise an American epic.
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Gide. Like his contemporary, James
Joyce, French writer Andre Gide (1869-1951)
rebelled against his religious (Protestant)
upbringing, and his reaction against the pro-
hibitions of revealed religion informed his life
and work. He gained notoriety for his open
discussion of homosexuality and promotion of
unabashed indulgence in the pleasures of the
flesh. He was preoccupied with the question
of man’s will, and agreed with Dostoyevsky
(a strong influence) that it is subject to good
and evil impulses, not related to love, hate, or
self-interest. This led to his development of
the concept of the acte gratuit ("gratuitous act") – a seemingly inexplicable action, motivated solely by a personal need to assert one’s
individuality, and thus the only human behav-
ior that reveals one’s essential character. (In
the novel, Lafcadio’s Adventures, Gide pres-
ents a murder as an acte gratuit.)
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