What is a Phoneme?

Definition

A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech sound that distinguishes one word from another word in a particular language. Each phoneme represents the smallest contrastive sound unit which may bring about a change in the word meaning. Traditionally, the linguists put the phonemes between slash marks. For instance: the words “mat” and “hat” are separated from each other based on the initial sound, that is /m/ and /h/ respectively.

Etymology

The English word phoneme was first used in the late 19^th century. It came via the French word phonème, which was borrowed from Greek phōnēma meaning “speech sound or utterance”, from phōnein meaning “to make sounds, speak”, from phōnē, meaning “sound, voice”.

Discussion

The phonemes encompass the possible small subsets of sounds that humans can produce through the speech organs. However, not all of the producible speech sounds are categorized as distinct phonemes since a particular sound may be pronounced in many different ways. Hence, the number of distinct phonemes is always lesser than perceptively different sounds. The phoneme sets may vary depending on the language system. But the five vowel sounds /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/ are present in most languages. Likewise, the consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/ are found nearly in all languages.

We should keep in mind that the phonemes are not letters; rather they simply refer to the sounds of a spoken utterance. Different phonemic symbols are employed to represent each phoneme. The one-part sounds are represented by a single letter, for instance, /p/ in “mop” and /t/ in “mat”. On the other hand, the two-part sounds are represented by a combination of letters, for example, /ʧ/ in “cherry” and /ʤ/ in “judge”.

The Functions of the Phonemes

The phonemes have the following three functions:

• Distinctive Function: It is the principle function of the phonemes. The phonemes can distinguish one morpheme from others, one word from others. This function could be subcategorized  in the following vein:

1. Morpheme distinctive: season-seasonal
2. Word or form distinctive: /bad/-/lad/
3. Sentence distinctive: Where is the hat? Where is the hut?

• Constitutive Function: The phonemes in isolation do not convey any meaning, but when they are combined they constitute meaningful words and morphemes. For example, the English phonemes /t/, /æ/and /b/ may constitute the words /tæb/ “tab” and /bæt/ “bat”.
• Recognitive (Identificatory) Function: We can separately recognize individual words due to the ordered cluster of their phonemes. Therefore, using the right phoneme in the right place is necessary to facilitate identifying different words.

Tools to identify a phoneme

Based on the phonological variation, the phonemes can be identified through the undermentioned tools:

1. Contrastive Sounds:

If two sounds are separate phonemes, then they are considered to be contrastive. Such sounds can be identified through the following principle:

Contrastive Distribution

In contrastive distribution when two sounds are placed in the same phonetic positions, they produce two different words.

Based on the contrastive distribution, different types of contrastive pairs could be taken into account to determine the phonemes of a language:

i. Minimal Pairs

Minimal pairs are two identical sounding words containing the same number of sounds that can be distinguished by a single phoneme appearing in the same position in both words. The criteria for determining a minimal pair are:

• Both words will have the same number of sounds.
• The adjacent sounds must be identical except for the contrastive sound.
• The contrastive sound must be distributed in the same position in both words.
• The words must be semantically different.

For example, “rice” and “lice” are different from each other in meaning as they have different initial phonemes, that is,  /r/ and /l/ respectively. 

ii. Minimal Sets

Minimal sets are more than two identical sounding words that can be differentiated by a single phoneme occurring in the same position in all the words. The following are the criteria for determining minimal sets:

• A group of words.
• The adjoining sounds must be identical except for one sound.
• The contrasting sound must occur in the same place in the string.
• All of the words must have different meanings.

For example, feat, fit, fat, fought, foot (vowel phonemes) and big, rig, fig, dig, wig (consonant phonemes).

iii. Near-minimal Pair

Where minimal pairs are not available, contrasts are illustrated through near-minimal pair. Near-minimal pair is a roughly identical pair of words having the dissimilar number of sounds that are distinguished by a few or more than one phoneme. Whereas minimal pairs are very limited in number, near minimal pairs are very easy to find. Therefore, the latter is the most dependable procedure for identifying phonemes.

Some examples of near-minimal pairs include:

get – guest

knees – sneeze

shoe – show

soup – snoop

tote – toast

feet – feast

2. Non-contrastive Sounds:

The sounds that do not make a difference in meaning are called non-contrastive sounds. Non-contrastive variants of a phoneme are referred to allophones. To be specific, when a phoneme is pronounced in two or more different ways then each variation is called the allophone of the same phoneme. They usually occur in different positions (i.e., environments or contexts) in the words.  However, these variations are not separate phonemes as they cannot contrast with each other, nor be employed to make meaningful distinctions.

The articulatory and acoustic distinctions of allophones are conditioned by:

• The position of the sound.
• The surrounding phonemes in the word or sentence.
• The dialectal variations in pronunciation.
• Language difference.
• Social factors.
• The pitch, tempo and stress of speech.

In contrast to phonemes, the allophones are written between square brackets. For example, in English, the phoneme /p/ has three variants:

Sl.	Allophones	Determining Factor	Distribution	Example
	[pʰ]	Strongly Aspirated	Word-initially	pot
	[p]	Weakly Aspirated	After “s”	spot
	[p¬]	Unaspirated	Word-finally	stop

There are different principles for discovering allophones:

i. Complementary Distribution

It is a distribution of a pair of speech sounds where the two sounds never occur in the same phonetic position. This simply means that only one sound of the pair will be found in a certain position, while the other sound will be found in everywhere else. They are generally the allophones of the same phoneme as they do not contrast with each other.

For example, in English, the aspirated [pʰ] can only be found at the beginning of a stressed syllable as in “pot”, while the unaspirated [p] is never found at the beginning of a syllable but can be found in other positions as in “spot”.

ii. Free Variation

When two different sounds occur in the same phonetic position without causing any change of meaning are said to be in free variation. That means, this principle does not try to contrast meanings in two different words, rather it simply to shows that there are two different ways of pronouncing the same word. Such allophones of a phoneme may arise due to different dialects, sociolinguistic or geographical factors.

For example, the word “either” may be pronounced as [aɪðər] or [iːðər].

Types of Phonemes

1. Vowels	Features			Examples
	Closeness	Frontness	Lip Rounding
Long Vowels	Close	Front	Unrounded	/i:/ as in sheep
	Close	Back	Rounded	/u:/ as in food
	Open-mid	Central	Unrounded	/ɜ:/ as in fern
	Open-mid	Back	Rounded	/ɔ:/ as in board
	Open	Back	Unrounded	/ɑ:/ as in car
Short Vowels	Near-close	Near-front	Unrounded	/ɪ/ as in ship
	Near-close	Near-back	Rounded	/ʊ/ as in put
	Open-mid	Front	Unrounded	/e/ as in pet
	Near-open	Front	Unrounded	/æ/ as in cat
	Open-mid	Back	Unrounded	/ʌ/ as in cup
	Open	Back	Rounded	/ɒ/ as in dog
	Mid	Central	Neutral	/ə/ as in garden

2. Diphthongs	Features			Examples
	Starting  Point  of Glide	Finishing Point	Lip Rounding
Centring Diphthongs	/ɪ/	/ə/	The lips are neutral throughout, with a slight movement from spread to open	/ɪə / as in ear
	/e/		The lips remain neutrally open throughout	/eə/ as in fare
	/ʊ/		The lips are loosely rounded, becoming neutrally spread	/ʊə/ sure
Closing Diphthongs	/e/	/ɪ/	The lips are spread	/eɪ/ as in aid
	/a/		The lips move from neutral to loosely spread	/aɪ/ as in isle
	/ɔ/		Lips start open rounded and change to neutral	/ɔɪ/ as in oil
	/ə/	/ʊ/	The lips are neutral but change to loosely rounded	/əʊ/ as in old
	/a/		The lips start neutral with a movement to loosely rounded	/aʊ/ as in owl

3. Semi-vowels	Features				Examples
	Place	Manner	Voicing	Lip Rounding
	labio-velar	Glide	Voiced	Unrounded	/w/ as in west
	Palatal	Glide	Voiced	Rounded	/j/as in yard

4. Consonants	Features			Examples
Plosives	Place	Manner	Voicing
	Bilabial	Stop	Voiceless	/p/ as in pin
		Stop	Voiced	/b/ as in bin
	Alveolar	Stop	Voiceless	/t/ as in tin
		Stop	Voiced	d/ as in dog
	Velar	Stop	Voiceless	/k/ as in coffee
		Stop	Voiced	/g/ as in gun
Nasals	Bilabial	Nasal	Voiced	/m/ as in mat
	Alveolar	Nasal	Voiced	/n/ as in native
	Velar	Nasal	Voiced	/ŋ/ as in bring
Affricates	Palato-alveolar	Affricate	Voiced	/ʧ/ as in cheap
		Affricate	Voiceless	/dz/as in jam
Fricatives	Labio-dental	Fricative	Voiceless	/f/ as in fast
		Fricative	Voiced	/v/ as in void
	Dental	Fricative	Voiceless	/θ/ as in theme
		Fricative	Voiced	/ð/ as in thus
	Alveolar	Fricative	Voiceless	/s/ as in sit
		Fricative	Voiced	/z/ as in zoo
	Palato-alveolar	Fricative	Voiceless	/ʃ/ as in ship
		Fricative	Voiced	/ʒ/ as in pleasure
	Glottal	Fricative	Voiceless	/h/ as in hen
Lateral	Alveolar	Liquid	Voiced	/l/ as in lee
	Alveolar	Liquid	Voiced	/ɫ / as in pool
Frictionless Continuant	Alveolar /Post-alveolar	Liquid	Voiced	/r/ as in rain

References

“Complementary distribution and Free variation.” ELLO. 2020. abergs. 14 November 2020

<http://www.ello.uos.de/field.php/PhoneticsandPhonology/ComplementaryDistributionAndFreeVariation>.

 

 “Phoneme .” Wikipedia. 2020. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 14 November 2020

<https://www.thoughtco.com/phoneme-word-sounds-1691621>.

 

 “Phoneme .” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2020. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 14 November 2020

<https://www.britannica.com/topic/phoneme>.

 

 “Phoneme .” SIL. 2020. SIL International, Inc. 14 November 2020

<https://glossary.sil.org/term/phoneme>.

 

“Proverbs with diphthongs.” studfiles. 2020. studfiles. 14 November 2020

<https://studfile.net/preview/5650607/page:5/>.

 

Roach, Peter. English Phonetics and Phonology: A self-contained, comprehensive pronunciation course.

3^rd ed. Cambridge: CUP, 2000.

 

Varshney, Dr. R.L.  An Introduction of Linguistics & Phonetics. Dhaka: BOC, n.d. 76-77.

 

Yule, George. The Study of Language. 2^nd ed. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. 54-61.

 

 “What Is a Phoneme? .” ThoughtCo. 2020. dash. 14 December 2020

<https://www.thoughtco.com/phoneme-word-sounds-1691621>.

Continue Reading

Quotations by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807–1882) WAS A RENOWNED 19TH-CENTURY NOVELIST AND POET.

“My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Secret of the Sea

“No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Endymion (1842)

“Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Voices of the Night

“Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Rainy Day

“Every heart has its secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion, Bk. III, Ch. IV (1839)

“Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion, Bk. IV, Ch. VIII (1839)

 “Thy fate is the common fate of all;
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Rainy Day

“I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Arrow and the Song (1845)

 “God sent his Singers upon earth
With songs of sadness and of mirth,
That they might touch the hearts of men,
And bring them back to heaven again.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Singers (1849)

“The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Ladder of St. Augustine, st. 10

“A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Santa Filomena, st. 10 (1858)

“Time has laid his hand
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Golden Legend, Pt. IV, The Cloisters (1872)

“The grave itself is but a covered bridge,
Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Golden Legend, Pt. V, A Covered Bridge at Lucerne

“All nature, he holds, is a respiration
Of the Spirit of God, who, in breathing hereafter
Will inhale it into his bosom again,
So that nothing but God alone will remain.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Golden Legend, Pt. VI, A travelling Scholastic affixing his Theses to the gate of the College

“The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Holidays (1878)

“I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christmas Bells

“For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus

“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Voices of the Night

“Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Builders (1849)

Continue Reading

Quotations by Wallace Stevens

WALLACE STEVENS IS A 20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN POET.

“The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

 

“If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

 

“We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

 

“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

 

“The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

 

“I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

 

“The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Study of Two Pears

 

“Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill”

~ Wallace Stevens, A Postcard from the Volcano

 

“After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things

 

“Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

 

“The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become,”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March

 

“In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
       Hills and a cloud.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Of the Surface of Things

 

“Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March

 

“As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March

 

“Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

“After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops' books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so. And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos

 

“Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

 

“Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

 

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier

Continue Reading

Quotations by Sophocles

SOPHOCLES (C. 496 - C. 406 BCE), A PROMINENT ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDIAN.

“Do not believe that you alone can be right.
The man who thinks that,
The man who maintains that only he has the power
To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul—
A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“In time you will know this well: For time, and time alone, will show the just man, though scoundrels are discovered in a day.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

 “Let every man in mankind's frailty consider his last day; and let none presume on his good fortune until he find Life, at his death, a memory without pain.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you.
All men make mistakes, it is only human.
But once the wrong is done, a man
can turn his back on folly, misfortune too,
if he tries to make amends, however low he's fallen,
and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornness
brands you for stupidity - pride is a crime.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“Men of ill judgment oft ignore the good
That lies within their hands, till they have lost it.”

~ Sophocles, Ajax

 

 “There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
Big words are always punished,
And proud men in old age learn to be wise.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“To throw away an honest friend is, as it were, to throw your life away”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“If you try to cure evil with evil
you will add more pain to your fate.”

~ Sophocles, Ajax

 

“I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“There's nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“Time, which sees all things, has found you out.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“I was born to join in love, not hate –

that is my nature.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“Tomorrow is tomorrow.
Future cares have future cures,
And we must mind today.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“We have only a little time to please the living.

But all eternity to love the dead.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be
When there’s no help in truth.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“The tyrant is a child of Pride
Who drinks from his sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest headlong
He plummets to the dust of hope.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“Death is not the worst; rather, in vain
To wish for death, and not to compass it.”

~ Sophocles, Electra

 

“Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“A man's anger can never age and fade away, not until he dies. The dead alone feel no pain.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

 

 “One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

 

“It is not right

if I am wrong. But if I am young, and right,

what does my age matter?”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“How terrible-- to see the truth when the truth is only pain to him who sees!”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“Truly, to tell lies is not honorable;
but when the truth entails tremendous ruin,
To speak dishonorably is pardonable.”

~ Sophocles, Creusa

 

“Give me a life wherever there is an opportunity to live, and better life than was my father's.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

Continue Reading

Quotations by William Carlos Williams

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963) A PROLIFIC AMERICAN POET AND PHYSICIAN OF THE 20^TH CENTURY.

“There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

“Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

“And this moral? As with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.”

~ William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain

“The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through the layers of demoded words and shapes.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it — It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but —As birds’ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight”

~ William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

“All women are not Helen,
                                                I know that,
but have Helen in their hearts.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (1955)

“The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.”

~ William Carlos Williams, The Young Housewife

“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech”

~ William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty

Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?”

~ William Carlos Williams, A Dream of Love

“It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits”

~ William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“To hell with everything I myself have ever written.”

~ William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel

“It was ...
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you”

~ William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems

“Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

“The past above, the future below
and the present pouring down: the roar,
the roar of the present, a speech--
is, of necessity, my sole concern.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.”

~ William Carlos Williams, Howl and Other Poems

Continue Reading

William Carlos Williams Quick Facts

William Carlos Williams, Pulitzer Prize-winning American physician, poet, short-story writer, novelist and essayist of the 20th-century modernist movement.

Profile

• Full Name: William Carlos Williams
• Birth Name: William Carlos Williams
• Date of Birth: September 17, 1883
• Place of Birth: Rutherford, Bergen County, New Jersey, United States of America
• Zodiac Sign: Virgo
• Date of Death: March 4, 1963
• Died at Age: 79
• Place of Death: Rutherford, Bergen County, New Jersey, United States of America
• Place of Burial: Hillside Cemetery, Lyndhurst, Bergen County, New Jersey, United States of America
• Epitaph:

“William Carlos

1883-1963”

• Cause of Death: Cerebrovascular thrombosis
• Last Words: NA
• Ethnicity: Mixed
• Nationality: American
• Father: William George Williams (1853-1918)
• Mother: Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams  (Elena) (1856 -1949)
• Siblings:

1. Brother: Edgar Irving Williams (1884-1974)

• Spouse: Florence Hilda Herman Williams (b. 1890-d. 1976) (m. 1912)

• Children:

1. Son: William E. Williams (b. 1914)
2. Son: Paul H. Williams (b. 1917)

• Alma Mater: University of Pennsylvania
• Occupation: Writer, physician
• William Carlos Williams is known for: revolutionizing American poetry by rejecting traditional conventions of rhyme and meter, and using colloquial American English.
• William Carlos Williams is criticized for: frequent delivery of contradictory and confused opinions.
• William Carlos Williams was influenced by: John Keats (1795–1821), Walt Whitman (1819–1892), James Joyce (1882 –1941), Ezra Pound (1885–1972), and Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC).
• William Carlos Williams’ works inspired: Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Charles Tomlinson (1927–2015), the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School.
• Literary movement: Modernism, Imagism

Quotes

“The earth cracks and
is shriveled up;
the wind moans piteously;
the sky goes out
if you should fail.”
– William Carlos Williams, Chicory and Daisies [from Al Que Quiere! (1917)]

Awards and Achievements

• Bollingen Prize (1953)
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1963)
• United States Poet Laureate (1952)
• National Book Award for Poetry (1950)
• American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Poetry (1963)

Major Literary Works

Poetry

• Poems (1909)
• The Tempers (1913)
• Al Que Quiere! (1917)
• Sour Grapes (1921)
• Spring and All (1923)
• Go Go (1923)
• The Cod Head (1932)
• Collected Poems, 1921-1931 (1934)
• An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935)
• Adam & Eve & The City (1936)
• The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938 (1938)
• The Broken Span (1941)
• The Wedge (1944)
• Paterson Book I (1946); Book II (1948); Book III (1949); Book IV (1951); Book V (1958)
• Clouds, Aigeltinger, Russia (1948)
• The Collected Later Poems (1950; rev. ed.1963)
• Collected Earlier Poems (1951; rev. ed., 1966)
• The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954)
• Journey to Love (1955)
• Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962)
• Paterson (Books I-V in one volume, (1963)

Prose

• Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920)
• The Great American Novel (1923)
• Spring and All (1923)
• In the American Grain (1925)
• A Voyage to Pagany (1928)
• Novelette and Other Prose (1932)
• The Knife of the Times, and Other Stories (1932)
• White Mule (1937)
• Life along the Passaic River (1938)
• In the Money (1940)
• Make Light of It: Collected Stories (1950)
• Autobiography (1951) W. W. Norton & Co. (1 February 1967)
• The Build-Up (1952)
• Selected Essays (1954)
• The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957)
• I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet (1958)
• Yes, Mrs. Williams: A Personal Record of My Mother (1959)
• The Farmers' Daughters: Collected Stories (1961)
• Imaginations (1970)
• The Embodiment of Knowledge (1974)
• Interviews With William Carlos Williams: "Speaking Straight Ahead" (1976)
• A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists (1978)
• William Carlos Williams: The Doctor Stories: Compiled by Robert Coles (1984)
• Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (1996)
• The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams (1996)
• The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998)
• William Carlos Williams and Charles Tomlinson: A Transatlantic Connection (1998)
• The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke (2004)

Drama

• Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams (1962)

Translations

• Last Nights of Paris (1929)
• By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959 (2011)
• The Dog and the Fever (2018)

 Did You Know?

• Williams was the eldest of the two sons born to William George and Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb.
• His father was English but raised in the Dominican Republic. His mother was a native of Puerto Rico of half French and half a genetic mixture of Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish extraction.
• Although coincidental, his paternal grandmother’s name was Emily Dickinson, which resembles the name of a prominent American poet.
• His younger brother, Edgar Williams was a renowned architect whose most outstanding designs include Donnell Library Center and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan.
• Williams fell in love with Charlotte Herman (Lotte), who ditched him for his younger brother, Edgar. Just three days after the rejection, he proposed to Charlotte’s younger sister, Florence (Flossie), who agreed to marry Williams in future.
• His eldest son followed Williams’ footsteps and became a doctor.
• Williams was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) in May 1963.
• Even though he had a successful literary career, Williams’ was mainly a physician.
• Surprisingly, being one of the most prolific writers, Williams authored only one medical article which was published in the Archives of Pediatrics in August 1913.
• His father was a businessman, working with advertising. He was a literature enthusiast and introduced his son to literary giants, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and most notably the Bible.
• Williams’ mother was a painter with a degree in art from Paris, who inspired him to paint in his early years.
• At high school, Williams was mostly interested in math and science. However, during this time he also became interested in literature and wrote his first poem as well. 
• In 1902, Williams met Ezra Pound and they became bosom friends. Although they always criticized each other’s poetry, their friendship remained intact until Williams’ demise.
• After meeting Pound, Williams deviated from the conventions of Shakespeare, Keats and Whitman and tended towards imagist poetry.
• Williams attended the Horace Mann School. He did not have to go to college at all since the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania used to admit selected students from reputed schools.
• Having received his medical degree from Pennsylvania in 1906, Williams did internships at both French Hospital and Child's Hospital in New York.
• He went to the University of Leipzig to study paediatrics and upon completion of the course, he started practising paediatrics in Rutherford in 1910.

Media Gallery

Photos

References

Carter, Richard. “William Carlos Williams (1883–1963): physician-writer and “godfather of

avant garde poetry.” The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. 2020. Elsevier Inc. 31 May 2020

<https://www.annalsthoracicsurgery.org/article/S0003-4975(99)00293-3/fulltext>.

 “William Carlos Williams.” Find a Grave. 2020. Find a Grave.

31 May 2020<https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1112/william-carlos-williams>.

“William Carlos Williams.” Poetry Foundation. 2020. Poetry Foundation.

31 May 2020< https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-carlos-williams>.

“William Carlos Williams.” Wikipedia. 2020. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

31 May 2020< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams >.

Continue Reading

E.E. Cummings Quick Facts

E.E. Cummings, 20th-century American avant-garde poet, essayist, playwright, and painter.

 

 Profile

• Full Name: E. E. Cummings
• Birth Name: Edward Estlin Cummings
• AKA: Edward Estlin "E. E." Cummings; Edward E. Cummings
• Date of Birth: October 14, 1894
• Place of Birth: Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States
• Zodiac Sign: Libra
• Date of Death: September 3, 1962
• Died at Age: 67
• Place of Death: Memorial Hospital, Conway, Carroll County, New Hampshire, United States
• Place of Burial: Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States
• Epitaph:

“Edward Estlin Cummings

1894–1962”

• Cause of Death: Stroke
• Last Words: NA
• Ethnicity: White
• Nationality: American
• Father: Edward Cummings (1861-1926)
• Mother: Rebecca Haswell Cummings (formerly Clarke) (1859-1947)
• Siblings:

1. Sister: Elizabeth Cummings Qualey (1901-1980)

• Spouse(s):

1. Elaine Thayer née Orr (1895-c. 1974; m. 1924 to 1924)
2. Anne Minnerly Barton (b. 1898-d. 1970; m. 1929 to 1932)
3. Marion Morehouse (b. 1906-d. 1969 m. 1932 to till his death)

• Children:

1. Daughter: Nancy T. Andrews (1919-2006)

• Alma Mater: Harvard University, Cambridge Latin School
• Occupation: Author
• E. E. Cummings is known for: incorporating innovative style and structure as well as mystical and anarchistic beliefs in his works.
• E. E. Cummings is criticized for: producing works that were sentimental as well as politically naïve.
• E. E. Cummings was influenced by: Amy Lowell (1874 -1925), Gertrude Stein (1874 -1946), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), and Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
• E. E. Cummings’ works inspired: Dave Eggers (1970), and Jonathan Safran Foer (1977)
• Literary movement: Modernism

Quotes

“when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because”
– E. E. Cummings, 1 x 1 (1944) no. 26

Awards and Achievements

• Dial Award (1925)
• Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry (1945)
• Harriet Monroe Prize from Poetry magazine (1950)
• Fellowship of American Academy of Poets (1950)
• Guggenheim Fellowship (1951)
• Boston Arts Festival Award (1957)
• Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1958)
• Two-year Ford Foundation grant of $15,000 (1959)
• Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard (1952–1953)
• Special citation from the National Book Award Committee for his Poems, 1923–1954 (1957)

Major Themes

• Love
• Sex
• War
• Childhood
• Nature
• Religion

Major Literary Works

• The Enormous Room (1922)
• Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
• & (1925) (self-published)
• XLI Poems (1925)
• is 5 (1926)
• HIM (1927)
• ViVa (1931)
• CIOPW (1931) (artworks)
• EIMI (1933)
• No Thanks (1935)
• Collected Poems (1938)
• 50 Poems (1940)
• 1 × 1 (1944)
• Santa Claus: A Morality (1946)
• XAIPE: Seventy-One Poems (1950)
• i—six nonlectures (1953)
• Poems, 1923–1954 (1954)
• 95 Poems (1958)
• 73 Poems (1963) (posthumous)
• Fairy Tales (1965)
• Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems (1983)
• Complete Poems, 1904–1962, edited by George James Firmage, Liveright 2008

Major Artworks

• e. cummings Self-Portrait
• Noise Number 13
• Scofield Thayer
• Untitled
• Sound

Did You Know?

• E. Cummings was the eldest of the two children born to Edward Cummings and his wife Rebecca Haswell Cummings.
• His father was a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard University. Subsequently, he left Harvard to become the minister at Old South Church in Boston.
• His mother Rebecca Haswell Clarke was the niece of Susana Haswell Rowson, the author of Charlotte Temple, the first bestseller novel in America.
• When her parents separated, Rebecca changed her last name from Hanson to Clarke, her mother’s maiden name.
• In 1933, Cumming’s younger sister Elizabeth Cummings married Carlton Chester Orlando Qualey (1904-1988), a Carleton College faculty member. The couple had two children namely John and Mary.
• Elizabeth Cummings Qualey’s When I Was a Little Girl (1981) contains memoirs of her childhood which she wrote 30 years ago for her children. In this book, she recounts her life with parents, brother E.E. Cummings, relatives, and friends from school, college and university.
• Cummings’ endeavour of writing dates back to early 1904 when he was under 10 years of age. His parents supported him spontaneously to help to develop his creativity.
• He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1915 and received a Master of Arts degree from the very university in 1916.
• After his graduation, Cummings served as an ambulance driver in World War I. Later on, he was unjustly imprisoned for three months at a French camp on suspicion of This experience inspired him to write his first book The Enormous Room (1922).
• Failing to release his son through diplomatic channels, Edward Cummings wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson. Cummings was finally released on December 19, 1917, and returned to the United States on New Year’s Day 1918.
• Later in July 1918, he was drafted into the U.S. army. He served at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, until the end of the war in 1918.
• In the post-World War I era, spanning between the 1920s and 1930s, he started to live interchangeably in France and the United States, finally settling in New York City.
• In the year 1921, he went to Paris to study art. Cummings also met Pablo Picasso, the famous 20^th-century painter whose work he venerated most.
• During his lifetime Cummings’ book earnings were never lucrative and he always had to remain worried about money. Due to abject financial condition, he continued accepting cheques from his mother even during his 50s.
• Cummings sent his poems in The Dial magazine so frequently that he won the Dial Award for poetry in 1925. The award secured Cummings a sum of $2,000.00 which was equivalent to his full year’s income.
• In 1926, Cummings’ parents encountered a fatal car accident, which instantly killed his father and left his mother severely injured but she did ultimately survive. His father’s demise left a profound impact in his mind and it paved the way for the beginning of a new phase of artistic development. Cummings paid tribute to his father in his poem my father moved through dooms of love.
• Cummings was married thrice, which reportedly include a long-term common-law marriage. He and his first wife, Elaine Orr was involved in an illicit love affair in 1919 while she was still married to Scofield Thayer, Cummings' best friend, mentor, and patron. When Thayer learnt about the relationship he was unruffled. Orr gave birth to Cummings’ only child Nancy on December 20, 1919. When Thayer divorced Orr, she and Cummings got married on March 19, 1924. However, the marriage lasted for less than nine months. He espoused his second wife Anne Minnerly Barton on May 01, 1929, but they got divorced three years later in 1932. Then Cummings met the fashion model and photographer Marion Morehouse. Although Morehouse lived with him till his death, it is still debatable whether they ever formally married.
• Before divorcing Elaine, Thayer took the complete financial responsibility for Elaine and Nancy. But after the divorce, he continued to provide support for Nancy.
• His daughter, Nancy was a poet, writer and artist.
• Until 1948, Nancy thought that Thayer was her biological father, but not Cummings.
• In 1943, Nancy married to Willard Roosevelt, the grandson of the former President Theodore Roosevelt but got separated in the early 50s. In 1954 Nancy married Greek classicist Kevin Andrews, the marriage, however, formally dissolved in 1968.
• At different stages of her life, Nancy used various names such as Nancy Thayer and Nancy Roosevelt. But ultimately she opted to use the name Nancy T. Andrews for the rest of her life. However, in her book Charon’s Daughter (1977), she used her name as “Nancy Cummings de Fôret.” And this is for the first and last time she used her father’s name.
• Initially, Cummings had to self-publish his works since none was interested to publish his works. Even after receiving the Dial Award, Cummings still struggled to manage a publisher. Only in the 1940s and 1950s, his writing style became popular and received critical acclamation.
• Cummings invented an exceptionally unique writing style which no one else followed. He deviated radically from the accepted rules of punctuation, spelling, capitalization and syntax. He even invented weird compound words to create a more subjective style.
• Tulips and Chimneys, Cummings’ first collection of poems, was published in 1923. Although Cummings was satisfied with the overall execution of the book, he was utterly displeased with the publisher as he reduced the book from 152 poems to 86 poems and replaced the “&” in the book title with the word “and”. The deleted poems, however, were published in 1925 under the title “&”.
• Apart from writing poems, novels, plays, and essays, Cummings also created numerous drawings and paintings. His most notable collection of artworks is CIOPW (1931), which contains 27 drawings and 72 paintings.
• At the time of his demise, Cummings was recognized as the second-best American poet after Robert Frost.

Media Gallery

Photos

 

 

Videos

References

“E. E. Cummings.” Wikipedia. 2020. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

27 May 2020< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings>.

“E. E. Cummings.” Poetry Foundation. 2020. Poetry Foundation.

27 May 2020< https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/e-e-cummings>.

Continue Reading