The 20th century saw an explosion of horror writers. From the era of pulp to the famed authors Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Clive Barker, writers put pen to paper and horrified their readers with tales of ghosts, monsters, devils, and other terrifying things.

Many of today’s horror writers are masters at conveying intense fear and feelings of dread and dismay. The greatest among them leave the reader simultaneously wanting more and wanting to sleep with the light on. Many of these writers will cite the name of a specific author as a massively important focus of inspiration: Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

A Childhood Haunted by Loss and Nightmares

H.P. Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Winfield, suffered from a debilitating madness and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. In 1898, Winfield died from “general paresis,” an old term for neurosyphilis. This early stage of Lovecraft’s life included visiting the hospital and listening to his father babble nonsensically. Asylums and madness would become a recurring theme in Lovecraft’s work.

After Winfield’s admission to the hospital, Howard and his mother, Sarah, went to live with her family. Lovecraft recounted that his mother was stricken with grief and never fully recovered from her husband’s absence and later death. Howard became very close with his grandfather, who encouraged him to read and write. By the age of three, Howard was already proficient.

In 1896, the death of his grandmother sent the family into gloomy unhappiness. This was around the time that Howard started having nightmares. In these recurring dreams, the young Lovecraft was tormented by beings that he called “night gaunts,” inspired by the drawings of the French artist Gustave Doré. These night gaunts would later become part of Lovecraft’s stories.

Lovecraft recalled that at the age of five, he was told that Santa Claus did not exist. He replied, “God is not equally a myth?” From a very young age, he began rejecting his Christian upbringing. He found a replacement for religion in his love for astronomy, and while still a child, he published for The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy.

As a child, he was also plagued by illness, the diagnosis of which is unknown today. As a result, he spent much time in and out of school, with home-schooling making up a large portion of his education. He struggled to make friends and developed a withdrawn personality.

By the turn of the century, Howard’s grandfather, Whipple, who supported the family, suffered financial setbacks, and the family fortune began to decline. In 1904, after a catastrophic business failure, he suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 70. Howard and his mother were forced to relocate to a semi-detached house. Lovecraft described this time as his darkest, and he was beset with thoughts of suicide. His desire for knowledge barely kept him from killing himself.

Despite these setbacks and suffering through a bout of illness in 1904, Howard began high school, which he actually enjoyed. He became involved with a small group of friends and enjoyed scientific studies, particularly chemistry. It was during high school that Lovecraft began producing short stories that would become the core of his Cthulhu Mythos — the fictional backdrop to many horror stories written by a series of horror authors. The Cthulhu Mythos would later inspire horror fiction in other media, such as films and games. His first stories were The Beast in the Cave, written in 1905, and The Alchemist, written in 1908.

In 1908, shortly before he would have graduated, H.P. Lovecraft suffered another bout of his undisclosed illness, which he described as a “nervous collapse” and a “sort of nervous breakdown.” As a result, he didn’t graduate and never went to school again.

From Reclusive Dreamer to Horror Writer

Despite Howard’s mental decline into a continuous depressive state, his mother doted on him, and the two got on well together. He wrote periodicals for science publications and endeavored to continue his study of science. Despite his hard work, however, he found the mathematics involved to be distinctly difficult, and he complained that it gave him such headaches that he would be incapacitated for the rest of the day.

At this time, he also had his first non-self-published poem appear in a local newspaper. It was, by today’s standards, a racist piece that envisioned what America would be like in a future where immigrants replaced Americans of English descent. He also wrote other, more racist poetry, which was never published.

In 1911, H.P. Lovecraft’s letters to editors began appearing frequently in pulp magazines, most notably Argosy. His letters sparked feuds with other authors who responded to his letters through the same medium. Eventually, his writing skills were noticed by Edward F. Daas, who was the head of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA). Daas invited Lovecraft and his nemesis John Russell to join the organization, and both writers accepted.

While continuing to write in the years that followed, H.P. Lovecraft became an outspoken critic of commercialism, which he saw as a factor driving cheap publications. He was a purist and only wanted to write for respectable publications. As an Anglophile, he also decried the use of American English, which he saw as inferior to British English. As he saw it, American English was corrupted by immigrants and slang. As chairman of the Department of Public Criticism of the UAPA, his opinion held power. In 1915, he was elected vice president of the UAPA, and two years later, he became president. He used his position to appoint board members who shared his views.

Being a powerful part of the literary community had a positive effect on H.P. Lovecraft, and from 1917 onwards, he began to devote more time to his writing. During this time, he wrote the short stories The Tomb and Dagon, which were considerably more polished than his previous stories. Howard became more outgoing and ended up meeting Lord Dunsany, an Anglo-Irish writer of fantasy who went on to have a great influence on Lovecraft’s works. Lovecraft also met Frank Belknap Long, an American horror writer who would become a lifelong friend of Lovecraft’s.

Marriage, New York, and the Birth of Cthulhu Horror

From 1918, H.P. Lovecraft’s mother, Sarah, began to decline mentally. She suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to Butler Hospital. Although her medical records were destroyed in a fire, it is known that she suffered hallucinations of strange creatures that would rush out at her from behind buildings. In 1921, Sarah died of complications from a gallbladder operation.

Howard was again thrown into depression, but he persevered and continued writing and attending conventions. At one such convention, two months after his mother’s death, he met his future wife, Sonia Greene, who was seven years his senior.

Three years later, the two were married and left Providence shortly thereafter to seek business opportunities in New York. It was there that Lovecraft met with high-profile writers and editors and began submitting his stories to Weird Tales. In January 1925, Sonia left for Cleveland to follow a business opportunity, while Lovecraft remained in New York to work on his own career. Things, however, would not turn out well for either of them.

Sonia’s business failed, and she lost all her assets. Howard tried to support her, but the editor of Weird Tales stepped down, and the new editor was a person Lovecraft had criticized in his writings; he subsequently fell out of favor.

Sonia became ill, and shortly after her recovery, she was constantly on the move as her job required her to travel around Ohio. At the same time, Lovecraft’s apartment was robbed and completely cleared out. He was left with nothing but the clothes on his back. At this point in his life, he wrote The Call of Cthulhu and other stories in which Lovecraft conveyed the idea of the absolute insignificance of humanity.

With his prospects in New York shattered, H.P. Lovecraft returned to Providence to live with his aunts.

Poverty, Illness, and Literary Legacy

After his return to Providence, H.P. Lovecraft wrote many of his most famous stories, including Shadow over Innsmouth and At the Mountains of Madness. Despite the brilliance of his writing, he showed indifference to whether they were published. He accepted the harsh hand that fate had delivered him and made little attempt to promote himself.

He would, however, keep in contact with many other writers and share his ideas. A notable figure in this regard is Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan. At this time, the “Lovecraft Circle” was born, a group of friends and writers brought together by Lovecraft’s ideas. Through this group, Lovecraft encouraged the sharing of ideas and promoted success in the world of pulp writing.

Having lived separately for several years, Sonia and Howard agreed to an amicable divorce. Sonia and Howard were married for 13 years. She would later discover that Howard had never finalized the divorce, and her subsequent marriage to Dr. Nathaniel Davis was technically bigamous.

By the time of the Great Depression, H.P. Lovecraft’s political views shifted radically. He had begun his adult life with conservative views, but by the mid-1930s, he lauded socialism. He was disillusioned with capitalism, which he decried along with fascism.

With his ever-shrinking financial means, life became harder. Lovecraft also avoided doctors. His illnesses and stomach pains went undiagnosed and untreated until 1936, when he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. The following year, on March 15, 1937, Howard Phillips Lovecraft died in pain.

H.P. Lovecraft lived a life full of suffering. He was plagued with mental and physical illness. The death and misfortune around him left him depressed and withdrawn. Both his career and his marriage failed.

It is perhaps because of these tragedies that Lovecraft was able to convey feelings of depression and dread in his works.

Sadly, like many creative minds before and after him, Lovecraft only became famous after his death. The fanbase that emerged after his passing, which exists as a powerful force in the realm of horror fiction, is one of intense passion and respect for the unique nature of H.P. Lovecraft’s imagination.

Every language tells the history of the people who speak and write it. The English language is a tapestry, documenting the interactions of English speakers over the centuries with speakers of other languages, from the early influence of the Celts and Anglo-Saxons as they fought for possession of the British Isles to Britain’s occupation of territories overseas. All these interactions have shaped the way we speak and write the English language. One ancient language that has given English hundreds of words is Arabic.

How Did English Gain Words From Arabic?

Unlike the Celtic languages, which influenced English by proximity, as people across the British Isles—especially in Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Cornwall—passed on or discovered local words for things, Arabic has mostly left its mark on English indirectly.

The majority of Arabic-derived words in English came in the medieval era, especially the 12th and 13th centuries, and were passed through Latin-based languages, such as Italian and Spanish. In the merchant ports of the Mediterranean, speakers of these languages would come into contact with Arabic speakers and sometimes adopt their words, altering them slightly on the way. Then, through the English-speaking world’s contact with Europe, these words would make their way into English, sometimes undergoing further alteration.

A second wave of words traveling from Arabic into English is discernible from the 16th century onwards. Some of these are loan words, meaning that they have not been partially translated or undergone alteration. We tend to use loan words for culturally specific things, such as foods (many Arabic words for which have come via Turkey, like couscous, falafel, hummus, and tahini) and religion (for instance, English speakers will be familiar with several words denoting Islamic beliefs and practices).

More often, though, words moved from Arabic into another language, more geographically close to Arabic-speaking parts of the world, before being taken up by English speakers. In many cases, these words enclose intriguing stories about people and places. Here are a few examples.

1. Zero

The history of this word reminds us of the vital influence of the Arabic-speaking world on mathematics. Roman numerals, used in medieval European numerical systems, had no specific word or symbol for zero. Instead, they used the word nulla (none) to express the concept.

Around the early 13th century, we have examples of Western mathematicians borrowing words from the Hindu-Arabic numerical system. Fibonacci, who encountered this system while living in North Africa, used the Latin word zephyrum, which was derived from the Arabic word sifr. This word, which also gives us the English word ‘cipher,’ referred to the concept of emptiness or nothingness.

By the 15th century, the Latin zephyrum had become zefiro and eventually zero in Italian, and zéro in French. From there, it became the English “zero,” first recorded around 1600, although not popularly used for another couple of centuries.

2. Chess

Around the same time that the English-speaking world gained the word for zero from Arabic, it also gained the game of chess. References to chess appear in Persian and Sanskrit texts from the 7th century, while the first chess manual, from the 9th century, was written in Arabic.

This manual refers to the shah, a Persian word denoting both the king itself and the action of putting the king in check. The final h in shah was pronounced more forcefully in medieval Arabic than we would pronounce it in English, leading to a sound more like a ck. Thus, medieval Latinate languages have variants such as the Italian scaco/scaccho (check) and scacchi (chess), the Catalan escachs (chess), and the French eschac/eschec (check) and eschas/esches (chess). (The word for the game remains plural in the modern versions of these languages.)

In medieval Italian, scaco matto was used for the action of taking the king. This came from the Arabic and Persian phrase shah mat, often translated as ‘the king is dead,’ though mat in Persian more accurately signifies that the king is ‘helpless’ or ‘paralyzed.’ Medieval French also used the word mat, which became ‘mate’ in English, giving us the term ‘check mate.’

The word shah ultimately gives us not just the words ‘chess’ and ‘check,’ but another game, ‘checkers,’ as well as related words such as ‘exchequer’ (originally meaning a chessboard, then denoting a patterned cloth used by lords in Norman England for counting revenue) and ‘checkered’ (from the pattern of squares on a chessboard).

3. Magazine

This word reminds us of the history of trade between Arabic speakers in the Middle East and North Africa and speakers of Latinate languages in Mediterranean seaports. Thirteenth-century Latin has the word magazenum, derived from the Arabic makhazin, a noun formed from the verb khazan, meaning ‘to store.’

Magazines, in their original sense, were storehouses, and the Latin word magazenum was found in port towns such as Marseille, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa. When the word entered English in the 16th century, it was initially used to denote a military storehouse or gunpowder depot.

After that, a ‘magazine’ in English was part of a gun: the ‘storehouse’ for bullets. Eventually, this meaning too was superseded by the one we are most familiar with today: ‘magazine’ as a store of written information, originally about military subjects.

4. Assassin

Another military-associated word from Arabic is ‘assassin.’ During the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, Christians traveling to the Arabic-speaking world from the Western world encountered various sects of Islam, including the Nizari Ismaili.

The Nizari Ismailis were mainly based in the Eastern Mediterranean region, where they waged attacks on chiefs of other sects, including the Christians. But it was their attacks on other Arabic-speaking sects that earned them the nickname hashīshīn. 

In the stories which subsequently circulated throughout Europe, the hashīshīn got their name because they would carry out their attacks after eating hashish (another Arabic-derived word). However, this seems to have been merely a rumor. What we do know is that the word hashīshīn soon became the Latin Assissini, and, before long, it referred not just to one specific sect, but to any group of professional killers.

5. Sequin

Another word with origins in the history of trade between Arabic speakers and speakers of Latinate languages is ‘sequin.’ In 13th-century Arabic, sikka was a tool for minting coins, and the word came to denote coinage in general by extension. The word appears in a trade treaty between the Republic of Venice and the sultanate of Aleppo in Syria.

Soon enough, Venetians were using their own word, which applied to the mint, the process of minting, and the coins: zecca, and then zecchino, which specifically referred to a gold coin minted in the Republic of Venice.

The zecchino was a key part of the currency of Venice from its introduction in 1284 until 1797, when Napoleon seized control of the city. The word outlived the currency, however, in the more French form ‘sequin,’ which originally referred to coins sewn onto clothing in the contemporary Venetian fashion.

6. Serendipity

Often counted among the most-loved words in the English language, ‘serendipity’ refers to unexpected good fortune or happy coincidences. This is an example of a word that did not develop over time from an ancient root, like so many of our words, but was more artificially coined, and may even have had a single creator, although he based his word on a pre-existing Arabic term.

Horace Walpole, author of the early Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, used the word ‘serendipity’ in a letter, claiming to have adapted it from a Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. Serendip or Serendib was the Arabic name for the country known in Walpole’s time as Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka.

Serendib itself derives from a Sanskrit name for the island, which declared that it was the dwelling place of lions. But for Walpole, reading over The Three Princes of Serendip, it gained a new meaning, thanks to the happy accidents and adventures of the protagonists in the tale.

7. Ghoul

You might think that ‘ghoul’ is a long-established synonym for ‘ghost,’ but the former word is relatively new in comparison to the Old English-derived ‘ghost.’ ‘Ghoul’ first appeared in English in 1786, in the Gothic novel Vathek by William Beckford. It may be that Beckford discovered the word, as goule, in a French translation of the Arabian Nights, published in 1712. Ultimately, goule came from the Arabic word ghul.

The ghul in Arabic folklore was the spirit of a long-lost relative who dwelled in graveyards and other desolate places. Originally, ghul was a feminine word, and these spirits were departed female relatives who appeared to men to lure them into danger, usually by transporting them to the desert and eating them. The living female relatives of these men, meanwhile, recognize the ghul for what it is and warn the men. Their ability to survive depends on whether they believe their female relatives. Eventually, though, ghul was masculinized, and in Vathek the word goule merely denotes a sinister, undead spirit which preys on the vulnerable.

8. Giraffe

People in the Arabic-speaking world were aware of giraffes long before anyone in Europe. The animal is native to Sub-Saharan Africa, and it is likely that we ultimately derive the word ‘giraffe’ from one of the languages spoken there.

The word entered European languages when Mediterranean travelers encountered giraffes in Cairo during the Middle Ages, though live giraffes would not arrive in Britain until the 19th century. They had taken the giraffes from Cairo, in Egypt, hence the Arabic derivation of the name. In Cairo, they had been called zirafa.

Before ‘giraffe,’ people in Europe referred to this animal by a different name, which came from the ancient Greeks’ and Romans’ vague acquaintance with it: ‘camelopard,’ blending its resemblance to the camel (in shape) and leopard (in pattern).

9. Several Words With the Prefix ‘al-‘

Even a slight acquaintance with Arabic will show you that many of its words begin with ‘al-,’ a prefix which functions as a definite article, like ‘the’ in English. All sorts of English words that begin with ‘al-‘ have Arabic roots.

Kimia referred in ancient Arabic to the study of substances, particularly the production of gold and silver, dating back to exchanges between Greek and Egyptian cultures in Alexandria. With the prefix, this became al-kimia, the source for the English words ‘alchemy‘ and ‘alchemist,’ strongly associated with the quest to make gold, but also referring to other metals and minerals. Over the years, further words were formed by dropping the prefix, giving us ‘chemistry,’ ‘chemist,’ and ‘chemical.’

Mathematical words with this prefix entered into English in a similar way to the word ‘zero.’ ‘Algebra’ derives from al-jabr, meaning ‘restoration of broken parts,’ from an idea of restoring balance which goes back to 9th-century Arabic mathematics. ‘Algorithm’ is a later invention, arriving in Latin as algorismus in the 12th century, from the name of the mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī.

The Arabic al-ghattas, meaning ‘the diver,’ gives us the name of the albatross via the medieval Spanish alcatraz. By the 17th century, European languages had adopted the modified form with a ‘b’ rather than a ‘c,’ influenced by the Latin word alba, meaning ‘white,’ to refer to the bird’s color. The same Arabic word lies behind the name of Alcatraz, the prison island off the coast of California, which was named, in archaic Spanish, ‘Island of the Pelicans.’

A final word derived from the Arabic prefix ‘al-‘ is ‘alcohol,’ which originated as al-kuhl. Kuhl referred to a finely ground powder, and is also the root of the modern English word ‘kohl,’ or eyeliner. When the word ‘alcohol’ entered Latinate languages in the 13th century, it still referred to powders. However, the alchemist Paracelsus exerted his own alchemical transformation on the word, using it to refer to liquids formed via distillation. He used the phrase ‘alcohol of wine’ when discussing the fermentation of liquors, which was eventually shortened (then extended to refer to any intoxicating drink) to ‘alcohol.’

10. Several Words for Food

As well as loan words that English has borrowed from Arabic-speaking countries to refer to local cuisine, there are several words for food that have traveled into English through other languages. In 16th-century England, you might have referred to a particular fruit as an abrecok, abrecox, or aprecocke, which originated from the Arabic al-barquq via the Spanish albarcoque. This became ‘apricot’ through the influence of the French spelling, which was aubercot or abricot. ‘Tangerine’ also has Arabic origins, but much more simply, the word comes from Tanja, the Arabic name for the city of Tangier in Morocco.

Many citrus fruits, in fact, have Arabic-derived names. ‘Lemon’ and ‘lime’ come from a common root, lim or limun, for the fruit introduced into the Mediterranean by Arabs around the 13th century (ancient Greeks and Romans grew a slightly different fruit, the citron, which gives us the word ‘citrus’). The same process brought orange trees to Europe, and the word naranj along with them, transforming into the Greek nerantzi, Spanish naranja, and Italian arancia.

‘Artichoke’ is derived from medieval Latinate variations on the Arabic word al-kharshuf: alcarchofa, carciofjo, and carchiophe. Aubergines, not known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and therefore lacking a word in English until the medieval period, derive their name from the Arabic al-badhinjan (alberginia in Catalan and then aubergine in French).

The word ‘coffee,’ like the drink it denotes, originates in Arabic: the word qahwa became the Turkish kahve, and then the Italian caffè. If you want to sweeten your coffee, turn to some other Arabic words: ‘sugar’ is from sukkar, whose Sanskrit derivation reflects the long history of cultivation of sugar in India. ‘Syrup,’ along with the etymologically related words ‘sorbet’ and ‘sherbet,’ comes from the Arabic word shirab or sharab. Originally, this was a medicinal liquid, a meaning it retains in the modern phrase ‘cough syrup.’

As a final sweetener, we have the word ‘candy.’ Medieval Persian used the word qand for the sugar grown in India, and when medieval Arabs began to cultivate the plant too, they used the same word. When turning it into an adjective, meaning something made of sugar, they called it qandi, and this is the word they brought to Europe along with the confectionery.

Of the three cantiche of the Divine Comedy, the Purgatorio (Purgatory) is perhaps the least read. Occupying a middle place between the chaos of the Inferno, where (in)famous sinners receive their eternal punishments, and the ethereal Paradiso (Heaven), Mount Purgatory is the realm of the afterlife where souls are offered the chance to purge their sins. Dante, guided by Virgil, reaches the second leg of his supernatural journey on Easter Sunday, feeling relieved to breathe in the fresh air after his descent through the circles of Hell. In the following 33 canti, the poet will meet the souls awaiting entry into Heaven.

Purgatory Is the Realm of Moral Change

In The Birth of Purgatory (1981), French historian Jacques Le Goff notes that, in Dante’s time, the concept of Purgatory had a more recent origin than the other two realms of the Christian afterlife, Heaven (Paradiso) and Hell (Inferno). Indeed, Le Goff dates the coining of the term purgatorium (Latin for Purgatory: from purgare, or “to purge”) to around 1170. More importantly, while Christian believers had long prayed for the souls of the dead (a practice that implied their souls were in a temporary condition), the concept of Purgatory and its doctrine were only loosely defined when Dante wrote his Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy).

The lack of consensus around the second realm of the dead gave the Florentine poet plenty of creative freedom. Indeed, as Columbia University Professor Teodolinda Barolini points out, “the very idea of Purgatory as a mountain is Dante’s own invention”, along with the rules of what the poet calls “la religione de la montagna” (the religion of the mountain): the regulations that those dwelling there must follow.

“The gentle hue of oriental sapphire” that greets Dante lifts his spirit and immediately tells the readers that the poet has left the violence and desperation of the Inferno behind. Indeed, in the first verses of the Purgatorio, described as “the lovely planet that is patroness of love,” Dante announces that he will sing of the “second kingdom, in which the human soul is cleansed of sin, becoming worthy of ascent to Heaven.”

While the “eternal dole” of the “lost people” of Hell was a way to repay a debt, caused by sin, the souls sent to Purgatory have to undergo a period of suffering to achieve moral change and freedom (from sin). In the Divine Comedy, Purgatory is the only realm where the dead are granted the “opportunity to continue becoming.” Through reflection, prayers, and hymns, the souls inhabiting the mountain of Purgatorio learn to leave their earthly things behind as they climb to the peak, the Garden of Eden, where they regain their lost innocence.

Purgatory Was Created by Lucifer’s Fall From Heaven

Dante narrates his transition from Hell to Purgatory in the last canto of the Inferno, where, after facing Satan, he passes through the center of the earth, leaving the northern hemisphere, where it is dark, and emerging into the light of the southern hemisphere. There, surrounded by water, is the mountain of Purgatory, formed as a consequence of Lucifer’s fall from Heaven.

According to Dante, when the fallen angel was cast from Heaven, the earth retreated from him. This empty conic space became the place of eternal damnation, with Lucifer at its deepest end. At the same time, the portion of soil displaced by the fall formed a mountain on the other side of the globe, becoming Mount Purgatory. Placed at the polar opposite of Jerusalem, Purgatory is the only land mass in the otherwise uninhabited southern hemisphere.

Dante and the Roman poet Virgil, his guide for much of his supernatural journey, reach the mountain after climbing up a narrow path carved into the rock by a stream. “And so we emerged, to see — once more — the stars,” comments a relieved Dante in one of the best-known verses of the Commedia.

After Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, Dante is the first living human to set foot on Mount Purgatory. Before him, only Ulysses, whom the poet met in the 26th canto of the Inferno, managed to catch a glimpse of Purgatory, “so high as I had never any one beheld,” as he sailed with his crew in the southern waters. Serving also as a personification of Adam, Ulysses’ folle volo (mad leap) is destined to end in tragedy as it aims to trespass the limits of human knowledge.

Dante’s own voyage, however, is part of the divine plan. “Our passage has been willed above,” reminds Virgil to Charon (the boatman ferrying the souls to Hell, who initially refuses to let Dante pass), “where One can do what He has willed; and ask no more.”

The Topography of Purgatorio: From the Ante-Purgatory to the Garden of Eden

As the chosen man to visit the three realms of the afterlife, Dante is granted full access to Purgatory. According to the poet, the mountain is divided into three regions. The base, known as Ante-Purgatory, is reserved for the souls of those who must wait before entering the higher sections of the realm. In this section, Dante meets the excommunicated, the late repentant, those who met a violent end, and the rulers who neglected their duties.

Then, past a gate where an angel draws seven Ps on Dante’s forehead, is Purgatory proper, which consists of seven terraces carved into the rock. Each terrace is devoted to the purging of one of the seven capital vices: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust. As in the Inferno, the souls inhabiting the Purgatorio are punished according to the rule of contrappasso, the divine law dictating that each punishment mirrors or contrasts the sin. The prideful, for example, are bent under massive stones, while the lustful must walk through a wall of fire.

As Dante, guided by Virgil, recalls his climb to the peak of Mount Purgatory, he describes his visit to each terrace using the same template. First, the poet presents an example of the virtue directly contrasting the vice being punished; then he describes his meeting with the souls; and finally, he gives the readers examples of the capital vices.

At the end of each tour of one of the seven terraces, an angel wipes a P from Dante’s brow, symbolizing the cleansing of one of the vices. He then, like all souls of the seventh terrace, passes through a blazing wall of fire. At the summit of Purgatory, the poet places the Garden of Eden, where humankind committed the original sin.

Key Encounters on Mount Purgatory

While the souls of Hell are fixed in the sinful habits that led them to eternal suffering, the inhabitants of Purgatory are in motion, constantly reflecting on their failings and working toward moral change. This allows Dante to sketch psychologically rich characters.

The first figure Dante and Virgil encounter is Cato of Utica (also known as Cato the Younger), a Roman senator who took his own life rather than submit to Julius Caesar. His very presence in the Purgatory, where he serves as a guardian, is in itself scandalous, showing “Dante’s willingness to embrace complexity and nuance.” Virgil previously told Dante that virtuous pagans cannot be saved, so why is Cato, a pagan who committed suicide, granted access to Purgatory? His refusal to live while losing his freedom is a fitting symbol of the quest of the souls of the realm: before entering Heaven, they must free themselves from their vices.

The decision to include the souls of those who were excommunicated by the Church is also somewhat controversial, as it is in contrast to the official doctrine. To be excommunicated meant to be excluded from the Christian community, yet in the third canto, Dante meets the saved soul of Manfredi, the son of Emperor Frederick II. Described as “fair—haired and handsome” and of “noble aspect,” Manfredi embodies the medieval chivalric virtues, and his encounter with Dante is steeped in a sense of empathy for human vulnerability. More importantly, it shows that those who truly repented, even if excommunicated, can be saved.

Theology and doctrine are also at the center of the poet’s encounter with Marco Lombardo on the terrace of wrath. To explain whether the cause of wickedness is in the “stars” or “down here,” the 13th-century courtier rejects astronomical determinism, delivering a lecture on free will that is at the center of the Divine Comedy’s ideological discourse. If the cause of human action resided in the stars, there would be no real free will. Thus, casting some souls to Hell and saving others would be meaningless. For both Dante and Marco, however, free will exists in a world ruled by an omnipotent God. The poet summarizes this coexistence in a paradox: “liberi soggiacete” (you, who are free, are subject).

We have already seen that to achieve moral freedom, the souls of Purgatory must free themselves from earthly things. The vanity of earthly achievements is the focus of Dante’s conversation with Oderisi da Gubbio. The renowned manuscript illustrator acknowledges that a rival has surpassed him, just as the painter Cimabue was eclipsed by Giotto, and Dante will surpass Guido Cavalcanti. “Your glory wears the color of the grass that comes and goes,” says Oderisi. And yet, one could argue, Dante’s fame remains indelible today.

Reaching the Summit and the Arrival of Beatrice

It takes four days and three nights for Dante and Virgil to climb Mount Purgatory. They reach the summit, where the Garden of Eden is located, on Easter Wednesday at dawn. Dante bases the description of the Earthly Paradise and its features on the Classical poets’ verses on the Golden Age, an idyllic pastoral world that the poet combines with the Biblical hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden.

The last six cantos of the Purgatorio, in which the poet recalls his visit to the Terrestrial Paradise, are among the most difficult in the Commedia, as Dante packs them with a densely allegorical narrative.

Welcomed by a pleasant breeze, the travelers first come across a stream of pure water. Beyond the stream, the poet glimpses a young woman, Matelda, who explains that Dante and Virgil are now in the Garden of Eden. After climbing the mountain, Dante is finally close to completing his purification process, having returned to humankind’s condition before the original sin.

Matelda guides Dante through the garden and tells him that the water of the stream flows directly, in two directions, from the divine will. One side, Lethe, erases the memory of sin, and the other, Eunoè, restores the memory of good deeds. Then, Dante witnesses a symbolic procession closed by a chariot drawn by a griffin. When the procession comes to a halt, the poet sees that the chariot is carrying Beatrice, his dead beloved and muse.

Astonished, Dante turns to Virgil, only to discover that he is gone: a pagan, the Roman poet cannot guide Dante into the third realm, Heaven. Dante weeps, grieving the loss of “Virgil, the gentlest father, Virgil, he to whom I gave my self for my salvation.” Calling the poet by his name (this is the only passage in the entire Comedy where the name “Dante” is recorded), Beatrice gently chides him and then confronts him, admonishing him for straying from the right path after her death.

Ashamed, Dante confesses his sins and repents. Beatrice then shows him an allegorical scene depicting the history and corruption of the Church, telling him to record what he sees “to profit that world which lives badly.” Dante is now ready to complete his cleansing by bathing first in the Lethe and then in the Eunoè. Thus, in the closing verse of the Purgatorio, Dante is “pure and prepared to climb unto the stars.”

If you’ve ever heard the Anthem of Europe being sung at major political or sporting events, you will already have some acquaintance with the words of Friedrich Schiller. Ever since his Ode to Joy was set to music by Ludwig van Beethoven in the early 19th century, Schiller, along with Beethoven, has been seen as emblematic of cosmopolitan unity and peace. Although Schiller resisted being defined by Ode to Joy, an overall message of harmony and freedom from despotic forces is a good summary of this giant of German literature.

Quick Facts About Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller’s Background

The Enlightenment was a double-edged sword for thinkers like Friedrich Schiller, born in 1759 in the Duchy of Württemberg (later to become part of Germany). It was a time of major advancements in both the sciences and the arts, when it seemed that all that could be thought and known was finally coming within humanity’s reach.

It was also a time of enlightened despotism, when wealthy nobles controlled what access ordinary people might have to all this learning. These rulers’ fondness for absolute power meant they could take away patronage from artists, philosophers, and scientists as quickly as they had bestowed it.

Schiller’s political thinking was shaped by his experiences as a young man, enrolled in a military academy overseen by the Duke of Württemberg. When it came time for the young Friedrich to pursue a specialty, the duke chose law for him, against his own and his parents’ wishes. Although he was later allowed to pursue medicine instead, this early taste of the effects of power on ordinary people’s lives informed everything Schiller wrote in adult life.

Also influential was the reading material that Schiller encountered in his formative years, which included Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. By the time he came to write poems and plays himself, Schiller was well-versed in the conventions of Enlightenment literature and, as a counterbalance, the contemporary movement known as Sturm und Drang. 

Literally translating to “storm and stress,” Sturm und Drang was about overturning the cold rationality of the Enlightenment and getting to the core of the human soul: the emotions, as informed by our experience of the world around us. Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, an instant sensation, was one of the foremost novels of the Sturm und Drang movement, dramatizing the irreconcilable conflict between moral absolutes and the complexities of human feeling.

Schiller’s Early Writing

The name Sturm und Drang came from a play of the same name by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, first performed in 1777. Plays were a hugely important medium in this movement, allowing audiences to witness a hero’s inner turmoil as a vivid drama played out on stage.

Schiller’s first play, The Robbers, premiered in 1782 and instantly propelled him to fame. What Schiller brought to the melodramatic conventions of Sturm und Drang was an acute political consciousness. Karl Moor, the protagonist of The Robbers, wages a battle against his father, with the domestic setting acting as an analogy for the political state.

The familial structure—or society—corrupts Karl and his brother, pitting them against each other in a struggle for power. Karl becomes an outlaw, joining a gang of robbers, turning to violence and anarchy to fight injustice. When Karl turns himself in, Schiller ultimately questions the usefulness of these modes of resistance against despotic forces: should we feel content that the law has won the day, or should we sympathize with this so-called “noble criminal?”

The same questions drive Schiller’s Don Carlos, which premiered in 1787. This time, the domestic setting is a more overt representation of the state, as the play centers on a royal family: the 16th-century King Philip II of Spain and his son Carlos. Again, the plots, crimes, violence, and insurrections in the play are driven by the people’s desire to be free from oppression, although in this case, the conflicting oppressive forces are the Catholic rulers of Spain and the Protestant rulers of the Netherlands.

Don Carlos draws on Schiller’s interest in history, and he published history books alongside his plays, becoming professor of history and philosophy at the University of Jena in 1789. Schiller’s historical works share themes with his plays. Indeed, in researching 17th-century conflicts, such as the revolt in the Netherlands against Spanish rule or the Thirty Years’ War and decline of the Holy Roman Empire, he pursued his political concerns.

For Schiller, states must allow their individual citizens to be free thinkers: free to develop rationally, morally, and aesthetically, guided by a sense of the good and true, but unhindered by restrictive systems of thought. His first lecture as a professor of history and philosophy took place just months before the outbreak of the French Revolution, an event which bore out Schiller’s conviction that the political struggles of his plays and historical writings were not a thing of the past.

From Playwright to Poet and Critic

Inextricably linked to Schiller’s values concerning the freedom of the individual are his ideas about aesthetics, which he wrote about in various letters and articles, largely written after a period of ill health in 1790. Despite the fact that his health remained poor until his death in 1805, Schiller managed to devote himself to studying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and synthesizing it with his own ideas.

Inspired by Kant’s writing on aesthetics, in 1793, Schiller produced a collection of letters usually titled On the Aesthetic Education of Man. The work is a triumphant riposte to the idea that questions of art and beauty are removed from politics. As Schiller argues, individuals who are free to encounter the sublime and the beautiful through encounters with art are ennobled and, thereby, better equipped to live in harmony with one another.

Moreover, Schiller writes that art is “the daughter of freedom.” To have the most valuable effect on people, art must be unrestricted. It must be free so as to encourage those who engage with it to be free.

Schiller’s own art was intended to demonstrate these ideas about harmony and unity. From his fourth play, Don Carlos, onwards, he wrote in blank verse and iambic pentameter. This was a significant development in German drama, bringing it closer to the art of William Shakespeare, who was revered in Germany at the time. Goethe’s play, Iphigenie auf Tauris, premiered like Don Carlos in 1787, also employed blank verse.

Schiller also wrote poetry, largely lyrics inspired by his work in other modes such as philosophy, drama, and history. Like the poetry of his English contemporary, William Wordsworth, these poems are reflective and contemplative, musing on human nature and the natural world together. However, Schiller’s best-known poem takes up his familiar theme: freedom.

It has been suggested that Schiller originally intended the title of Ode to Joy to be Ode to Freedom. Even if this cannot be proven, it is at least plausible to think of “joy” as a shorthand for “freedom” in Schiller’s mind, especially given the poem’s rousing invective and its urge to the audience to seize joy even when they are crushed by oppressors. When Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s setting of the poem in Berlin in 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the singers significantly sang about Freiheit (freedom) rather than Freude (joy).

Schiller originally wrote Ode to Joy in 1785, around the time he was writing Don Carlos, and the poem shares that play’s spirit of hopeful revolt. However, Schiller later turned on the poem. He eliminated a final stanza about heroes and villains alike deserving release from tyranny. In 1800, he told a friend that Ode to Joy “appealed to the flawed taste of the time,” perhaps feeling that its pre-French Revolution optimism no longer suited the world around him.

Friendship With Goethe

Together with Goethe, Schiller is regarded as one of the defining figures of a blossoming period in German culture, when movements such as the Enlightenment and Sturm und Drang came together amid the beginnings of Romanticism.

The two writers’ friendship also formed the cornerstone of a movement called Weimar Classicism, centered on Weimar, the city in Eastern Germany which they transformed into the nation’s literary capital. Goethe had been living there since 1775, serving on the local privy council and helping to implement reforms at the nearby University of Jena. He was the one who recommended Schiller for the post of history and philosophy professor at Jena, and Schiller moved to Weimar in 1787.

Although Goethe was traveling in Italy when Schiller, hoping to make the acquaintance of a man who was already something of an intellectual hero, arrived, the two eventually struck up a friendship in 1794. Together, they attracted many of Germany’s major thinkers to Weimar, hosting literary salons and facilitating collaborations on important works of literature, philosophy, art criticism, and history.

The pair’s most significant achievement over the ensuing eleven years (until Schiller’s death) was their promotion of the German National Theater in Weimar, of which Goethe had been director since 1791. This is where Weimar Classicism flourished, where theater companies staged plays that returned to classical (ancient Greco-Roman) principles, synthesized with a modern emphasis on feeling.

Goethe and Schiller are commemorated with statues outside Weimar’s theater. It was thanks to them that Weimar became an intellectual center which, even after their deaths, attracted figures such as Franz Liszt (who became music director there in 1842), Felix Mendelssohn, George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes.

Around this time, Schiller wrote Wallenstein, a cycle comprising poetry and a trilogy of plays, based on the Thirty Years’ War. Like many of his dramas, Wallenstein centers on a rebellious hero who takes on a corrupt regime, but whose own morality is not crystal clear. As so often in his work, Schiller investigates the corrupting effects of power, not only on individuals entangled with a dominant regime, but also on those attempting to overthrow it.

Final Years and Legacy

The chest trouble, ultimately tuberculosis, which plagued the last 15 years of Schiller’s life, did not stop him from producing masterly works of literature, history, and philosophy. In fact, the last five years of his life saw Schiller write four plays in quick succession, including those for which he is best known today.

Each play, like his earlier work, dealt with political conflict between heroic individuals and oppressive regimes. By then, Schiller’s friendship with Goethe and work at the Weimar Theater had taken his stagecraft to new levels, and these works adhered to classical principles about tragedy and heroism.

Maria Stuart (1800) takes the audience into the mind of Mary, Queen of Scots as she awaits execution, knowing that her death is necessary for the Elizabethan regime to continue, but reconfiguring the judgment upon her as punishment for her sins—thus achieving a moral rebirth unintended by judge and jury. The play captured the imagination of the opera composer Gaetano Donizetti, whose Maria Stuarda was first performed in 1835. (Giuseppe Verdi, a younger Italian composer greatly influenced by Donizetti, turned Schiller’s Don Carlos into an opera in 1867.)

The Maid of Orleans, in 1801, played fast and loose with history by having its heroine, Joan of Arc, die on the battlefield rather than on the stake. The play formed the partial basis for an 1881 opera by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Bride of Messina, in 1803, saw Schiller living out his commitment to classical principles by infusing modern drama with elements from Greek tragedy. It inspired an overture by Robert Schumann.

Finally, just a year before his death, Schiller wrote William Tell. In many ways, it was a return to where he had started with The Robbers. Indeed, both plays focus on a noble outlaw who leads a band of rebels, and both question the means used by these outlaws to achieve justice. William Tell was a figure from Swiss mythology, whom Schiller may have discussed with Goethe following the latter’s travels in Switzerland in 1779.

As the years passed and Europe was swept up by Romanticism and revolutions, William Tell became more and more popular, its hero an emblem of individualism and resistance to authority. The play, adapted into a French libretto, furnished Gioachino Rossini with the story for his sprawling opera, which premiered in 1829. Dogged by censorship in its early years because of its dangerously revolutionary content, William Tell is now one of the best-known operas of the 19th century—particularly its much-performed overture, which conjures up images of Swiss soldiers on the march.

A poet whose work is as frequently autobiographical as Lord Byron’s could hardly be surprised that his 21st-century reputation rests as much on his scandalous private life as on his verse. He is colloquially known as a notorious womanizer, an egotist, and a misanthrope, with more than the usual affectations of any English aristocrat: a real-life Gothic antihero who mythologized his own villainy before seeking safer climes in Europe. Faced with absolute social ruin, Britain’s greatest Romantic poet fled his homeland in 1816, never to return. This is the true story of the outrageous scandals that drove Lord Byron into permanent exile.

The Meteoric Rise of a Literary Celebrity

“What is the end of Fame? ’tis but to fill / A certain portion of uncertain paper: / Some liken it to climbing up a hill, / Whose summit, like all hills’, is lost in vapour, / For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill, / And bards burn what they call their ‘midnight taper,’ / To have, when the original is dust, / A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.”

(Don Juan, canto 1, stanza 218)

George Gordon Byron was destined for fame and fortune. He had auspicious parentage: the swashbuckling Captain Jack Byron, later dubbed ‘Mad Jack’ in an obituary of his son, and Catherine Gordon, heiress to a castle and fortune in Aberdeenshire in Scotland. Byron’s paternal grandfather was another seaman, who had set the record for fastest circumnavigation of the globe by sea.

Byron’s father did not stick around for long. He died in 1791 when Byron was just three, leaving him to be raised by a formidable mother who drank heavily (possibly to deal with the pressures of raising her son alone) and was not always sympathetic to his bouts of self-conscious anxiety, partly caused by the club foot he had been born with and his fluctuating weight.

When Byron was only ten, he became a Lord, inheriting a baronage and the ancestral home of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire on the death of his great-uncle. The young Byron mostly grew up in Aberdeenshire, the outskirts of London (including the private school Harrow), and eventually Trinity College, Cambridge (where he notoriously kept a pet bear, as a protest against the college’s rule against pet dogs).

Byron’s early life set the scene for an uneasy relationship with the fame that would soon envelop him. Not only were there the unusual circumstances of his parents, but he was sexually abused by adults (women and men) from the age of nine. Undoubtedly traumatized, Byron found life at Harrow difficult, compounded by problems participating in sports because of his foot, and the dawning realization of his attraction to men. At Cambridge, he fell passionately in love with a choirboy, John Edleston, to whom he later wrote several poems.

After Cambridge came fame. The usual story is that he published the first two cantos (sections of a long narrative poem) of the semi-autobiographical Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812 and, in his words: “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”

In reality, he had already done a good deal to become infamous, publishing a few volumes of youthful verse, making himself known around London, and in 1809, publishing the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. This was in the vein of Byron’s main inspiration, Alexander Pope, whose poem The Dunciad had lampooned poor taste in 18th-century literary London, particularly the area known as Grub Street and associated with hack writers.

Byron took aim at fellow poets, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom history would later bracket him as members of the English Romantic school, but his main target was the critics. He then went on his first flight of refuge from English society, traveling across Greece and Turkey. He poured all of these experiences into Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published it on his return, and the stage was set. Readers and critics praised the book in their droves, and all eyes were on Byron.

He Lived the Dissolute Life of a Lord

“Whilome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth, / Who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight; / But spent his days in riot most uncouth, / And vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of Night.”

(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 1, stanza 2)

Regency London was aflutter with stories about the handsome young poet. He had been in debt since his Cambridge days. He was fiercely fussy about portraits of himself. He was learning boxing. He intended to enter Parliament as a radical politician. He drank wine out of a human skull at Newstead Abbey. He had swum the Hellespont (now called the Dardanelles), as Leander does in order to be with Hero in the Greek myth. He was having an affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb.

All of these were true to an extent, although the skull cup story is difficult to verify and is primarily based on a poem he wrote called Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull. What is certain is that Byron made a name for himself as a complex figure combining liberal politics, sensitivity, and passionate fervor for poetry as a craft with misanthropy, cruelty (especially towards women), and a flair for dramatic scenes and self-mythologizing.

Another famous catchphrase associated with Byron is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” attributed to Lady Caroline Lamb after their stormy affair in 1812. In a period full of romans à clef (novels with a key), in which authors depict thinly veiled caricatures of well-known friends and associates, Lamb’s Glenarvon, published in 1816, is particularly notable for its portrait of Byron as a faithless lover. This was the first of many, many works (besides his own) to feature Byron as a character.

Other affairs abounded, some with noblewomen, others with actresses, including at the Drury Lane Theatre, where Byron briefly pursued theatrical aspirations by serving on its sub-committee in 1815. Although he took his seat in the House of Lords, he ultimately made just three speeches: one opposing the death penalty for workers who destroyed new weaving machinery in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, one advocating for Catholic Emancipation, and one urging prison reform.

Incest and Infidelity Behind Closed Doors

“He through Sin’s long labyrinth had run, / Nor made atonement when he did amiss, / Had sighed to many, though he loved but one, / And that loved one, alas, could ne’er be his”

(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 1, stanza 5)

The most scandalous rumor to plague Lord Byron was the charge of adulterous incest. Augusta Leigh was Byron’s half-sister, daughter of Jack Byron and his first wife. Jack was absent from both children’s lives, and they were not raised together, meeting very infrequently until they were in their twenties.

Reports swirled that, whenever they were at parties, the two would retreat into a corner, laughing and joking. Byron later wrote her an epistle (a dedicated poem), suggesting that only with Augusta did he feel he could be his true self. Had they fallen in love, or was it a connection of a different kind?

Despite his reputation, Byron is recorded elsewhere as being no great fan of parties, and perhaps Augusta offered a sympathetic listening ear to her bisexual half-brother amid a social circle which, although Byron was fêted in many ways, could not countenance two men being in love.

One piece of evidence for the relationship being incestuous is a letter Byron wrote shortly after Augusta gave birth to a daughter in 1814, expressing relief that the child was not deformed. Did this betray a worry about children born of incest, or of passing on his club foot, or is there a more innocuous explanation?

The incest accusations were all the more shocking, and may even have come about in the first place, because Byron continued this alleged affair during his short-lived marriage to Caroline Lamb’s cousin, Annabella Milbanke. A prodigiously intelligent woman, she had set out with the intention to reform Byron’s faults.

But Milbanke soon found herself agreeing with each one of Lamb’s epithets for Byron: mad, bad, and dangerous to know. His moods were volatile, he drank and continued to pursue affairs, and he tormented her during her pregnancy by throwing bottles at the ceiling below the room where she was sleeping. Their daughter Ada, later the renowned mathematician Ada Lovelace, was born in 1815, but the two separated a few months later. (One story alleges that Annabella, now a single mother as Byron’s had been, hid the remaining portrait of Byron behind a curtain and forbade Ada from looking at him.)

Seeking a divorce, Milbanke claimed that Byron was verbally and physically abusive, subjected her to nonconsensual anal sex (although, with or without consent, it was then illegal), and was committing incest with Augusta. Some elements of this are harder to prove than others, and it seems that one of Milbanke’s sources for the incest charge was her cousin Caroline, who had her own reasons for resenting Byron.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the scandal, coupled with mounting debts, which eventually led Byron to sell Newstead Abbey, was enough to make him flee Britain again in 1816, never to return in life.

Public Backlash and the Flight From England

“The world is all before me; I but ask / Of Nature that with which she will comply— / It is but in her summer’s sun to bask, / To mingle with the quiet of her sky”

(Epistle to Augusta)

Scandalous reports followed Byron after he left Britain for Geneva. Soon after he and his doctor, John Polidori, settled at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, they welcomed the poet Percy Shelley, his soon-to-be wife, Mary Godwin, and Godwin’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

It was thanks to Clairmont and her literary-theatrical aspirations that the group came into contact with Byron. She had corresponded with him during his stint at Drury Lane Theatre, and when the Shelleys were driven into exile because of their own scandals and debts, she suggested chasing up Byron.

At the Villa Diodati, Byron had an affair with Clairmont which resulted in a daughter, Allegra, whom Byron initially ignored, then arranged to have placed in a convent, where she died of a fever aged just five. Clairmont is quoted, possibly apocryphally, as saying that her affair with Byron gave her “a few minutes of pleasure, but a lifetime of trouble.”

Also at the Villa Diodati, the group held a ghost story contest, whiling away the time when the weather (1816 was the ‘Year Without A Summer‘) kept them indoors. This contest produced, famously, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as Polidori’s The Vampyre (more on which below), and a fragmentary vampire story by Byron, later published alongside his poem Mazeppa.

In his customary balancing act, Byron continued to work hard while scandalizing half of Europe. In Geneva, he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In Venice, where he pursued affairs with men and women, he also immersed himself in Turkish and Armenian history and culture. This led to his work helping to compile an Armenian-English dictionary in 1821 and, in the same year, his drama Cain, which drew on the Armenian telling of the Biblical story.

From 1817 to 1823, Byron moved around Italy, living in Rome, Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa. He wrote another drama, Manfred, which was a Gothic-tinged version of the Faust legend, in which the (again) semi-autobiographical hero, mysteriously plagued by guilt after his beloved’s death, seeks supernatural intervention to redeem himself. (Neither Manfred nor Cain was written for stage performance; these are called closet dramas.)

Illustration for Byron’s Manfred by Juliusz Kossak, 1859. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Polona

In Ravenna, Byron fell for a young aristocratic woman, Teresa Guiccioli. He channeled his now inescapable reputation as a womanizer into another semi-autobiographical long narrative poem, Don Juan, started in 1818 and left unfinished, with seventeen cantos published, on his death in 1824. The hero, Don Juan, is also known in art as Don Giovanni, the insatiable philanderer of Mozart‘s opera.

Yet in Byron’s poem, which returned to the satirical style of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers from a decade earlier, Don Juan is comically revised as a feckless young man, more seduced than seducing. Like Childe Harold in Byron’s earlier poem, Don Juan is an adventurer, his travels on the high seas reflecting the wanderlust instilled in Byron since birth. (Through a happy accident, he missed out on the boating trip in which Percy Shelley drowned in 1822.) Wherever Don Juan goes, he meets a beautiful woman who seems determined to possess him. How can he resist?

Greek Revolution and the Final Act of Valor

“Seek out—less often sought than found— / A Soldier’s Grave, for thee the best; / Then look around, and choose thy Ground, / And take thy rest”

(January 22nd, Missolonghi)

Byron’s interest in radicalism and revolutions, combined with his interest in the history of Greco-Turkish conflict, inspired him to take up the cause of Greek independence in 1823. He had grown comfortable with Guiccioli, who had left her husband to be with him, and it is tempting to suggest that Byron, like his father, simply could not stay in one place or one relationship for long.

Greece had featured in Byron’s travels and his poetry documenting those travels since as early as 1809. When a revolution broke out in 1821, with Greek forces striking out against the Ottoman Empire, many people back in Britain espoused the Greek cause as Philhellenism, an enthusiasm for Greece rooted in reverence for ancient Greek culture, spread. In 1823, the London Greek Committee was founded. Eventually, they convinced Byron that he might be able to help the cause.

On arrival in Greece, Byron found himself pulled in all directions by rival factions. He primarily provided financial support, although he also got involved with preparing military and naval equipment and made diplomatic efforts among the factions. He was keen to help more practically, and in early 1824, planned to join an expedition to attack Turkish forces at Lepanto.

Byron’s final poem, written on his birthday in January 1824 at Missolonghi before the expedition set sail, captures both his military ambitions and his looming awareness of his own mortality, though he was only 36. Despite the poem’s valiant call to action, Byron himself did not reach a “Soldier’s Grave,” as he fell ill with fever before the Lepanto expedition departed. Local doctors bled him with leeches, which only weakened him, and he died in April without seeing battle.

Against his wishes, his body was returned to England. Nevertheless, he was mourned as a hero in Greece, recognized for the symbolic (and financial) contribution he made to Greek independence.

The Eternal Myth of the Byronic Hero

“But I have lived, and have not lived in vain: / My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire, / And my frame perish even in conquering pain, / But there is that within me which shall tire / Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire: / Something unearthly, which they deem not of, / Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre, / Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move / In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.”

(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza 137)

Few poets have become immortalized in adjectives as meaningfully as Lord Byron. To be ‘Byronic’ is to encapsulate the myriad complexities of this charismatic, cruel, conflicted, and compelling poet.

Thanks in part to fictionalized portraits by Caroline Lamb, John Polidori, and Byron himself, literature gained the stock character of the Byronic hero: brooding, mysterious, haunted. Polidori’s portrait of Byron as the vampire Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre was significant in transforming literary vampires from the monstrous creatures of folklore into all-too-human, aristocratic charmers, an image they have been unable to shake off ever since.

The heady combination of scurrilous rumors and insistent self-mythologizing in Byron’s life and works also created a lasting idea of the Romantic poet. While Percy Shelley, John Keats, and others also influenced the stereotype, the notion of the Romantic poet as a dashing young man in an open-collared shirt, composing his verses in the open air, scandalizing mere mortals wherever he goes, and hurtling headlong towards a tragically untimely death, owes in large part to Byron.

His poetry is sometimes overlooked in favor of stories about his life, especially the underestimated extent of his reverence for 18th-century poetry, unlike his more radical contemporaries in Romanticism who departed from what they considered outmoded traditions. But this poetry is inextricable from his life story, since he made his scandalous life into art.

From Gombrich to Pollock, several books have made waves and started conversations in the art world. In the rich tapestry of discussions on art, there is something fascinating about entering the minds of artists themselves. In written form, many artists have given their interesting inputs on life, art, creativity, and society.

If you enjoy a good book about art, why not try some writings about artists in their own words? Here is a list of some iconic books written by famous artists to add to your reading list.

1. “The Interaction of Color” by Joseph Albers

To start things off, let’s go with a classic. Joseph Albers’ The Interaction of Color is a well-known work among painters, students, and professors—so many people even read the book before becoming familiar with Alber’s own work as an artist. First widely published in 1971, at a time when painting was losing space to the innovations in conceptual art, The Interaction of Color was a work that took color theory to new depths. Filling a complicated space between technique and philosophy, science and poetics, Albers’ book remains fresh and relevant decades later. It’s a book recommended not just for artists but for anyone looking to understand in greater depth topics such as the nature of human perception, vision, and our relationships to a uniquely relevant aspect of life—color.

2. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh is one of the most beloved names in the history of art. The often beautiful, often harrowing bumps in his life are well-known, and one particular aspect of his character was that Van Gogh was a prolific letter-writer. Historians believe he wrote over three thousand letters in his life. Luckily for us, many of them have lasted to tell tales.

Most of Van Gogh’s surviving letters are communications with his brother, Theo van Gogh. In them, the artist reveals fascinating insights into his troubled life, his views on love, happiness, malaise, and, of course, art. His letters are a fascinating window into the process of his paintings and the evolution of their production. It is not only his work that is highlighted in Van Gogh’s writing; in them, we get a unique view of the time period and the revolutions happening in art and society. It is an incredible read for anyone interested in 19th-century art and the changes that the century brought.

Many different compilations of Van Gogh’s letters have been published over the years, the most popular being Penguin Books’ The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. In the 2000s, the Van Gogh Museum published many of his surviving letters and documents, which can be accessed through the museum, in their book Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters. 

3. “Between Lives: An Artist and Her World” by Dorothea Tanning

Known for her beguiling paintings and sensorial sculptures, multi-technique Surrealist Dorothea Tanning also wrote a handful of books. Like her visual work, Tanning’s writing is similarly sensual and involving. Tanning, who lived to be 101 years old, was one of the last and most interesting Surrealists we ever had. Her books ranged from poetry to memoirs to fashion and the in-between. In 1986, she released her first memoir, Birthday, which mostly relates to her relationship with fellow artist and surrealist Max Ernst. In 2001, Tanning released an expanded version of Birthday, named Between Lives: An Artist and Her World.

Larger in scope and even richer in language, Between Lives takes the reader into the mind and significant life (and loves) of Dorothea Tanning. Much like her art, Dorothea Tanning’s writing has a deep influence from Gothic romances and fairy tales: her writing is highly imagistic, layered, and sumptuous, whether Tanning is talking about her restrictive upbringing or recounting enduring and passionate relationships. The words certainly do come alive in this fascinating look into the mind of a great artist.

4. “How to See” by David Salle

David Salle’s 2016 book How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art is more than a purported collection of essays. Salle, a preeminent painter since the 1970s who works in multi-layered, multi-textured images, brings those layers to his writings to create a singular art book.

Through the eyes of the artist and with input from others such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, and more, How to See inverses the usual logic of art criticism; Salle’s How to See is less concerned with the concepts, the why and the what does it mean, and more interested in the what it is and how and what is the impact of an artwork. It has been compared to critic John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing, as a response to the conversation between critics and artists.

How to See is an almost immersive experience. It looks at art and the world the way a scientist might reverse engineer a machine to understand what makes it work, all the while traversing art history and theory in a humorous and approachable way.

5. “AFRICOBRA” by Wadsworth A. Jarell

The AFRICOBRA Collective was a collective of Black artists founded in Chicago in 1968 that redefined the standards of what the largely white art establishments dictated in the midst of civil rights movements in the United States. Painter, printmaker, sculptor, and founding member of AFRICOBRA, Wadsworth A. Jarrell tells the story of the collective, spanning its history, practices, philosophies, and impact on the art scene of the 1960s and beyond.

AFRICOBRA, the novel, is not merely a biography of a collective but a testament to their work, the recognition of Black American culture and art, and an insight into the artists’ views on different forms of art, society, justice, and life. A highlight is a close look at the creation of the famous Wall of Respect mural in Chicago, a paradigm-shifting work that predates even the foundation of the collective.

6. “Secret Poetics” by Helio Oiticica

Helio Oiticica was a highly influential contemporary artist of the 20th century who helped shape interactive art and installation in its earliest forms. He’s had a tremendous impact on painting, film, and sculpture in Brazilian art. Though his penetráveis, bólides, and wearable parangolés became well-known pieces that marked contemporary art, Oiticica’s writing is less familiar to audiences at large. Oiticica wrote many essays, which have been featured in many art books and overviews. But one book stands out: his collection of poems, Secret Poetics.

Secret Poetics collects different types of writing. It comprises secret poems the artist wrote by hand between 1964 and 66, during a time of many transitions in his life and his artwork. Translated into English for the first time in a bilingual edition, Secret Poetics shows us an almost unknown facet of an artist of many faces and sheds light on how these musings on memory and human relations intertwine with his later work. Secret Poetics was translated and edited by Rebecca Kosik with commentary by Pedro Erber, who further reflects on the nature of Oiticica’s written art and its influence on the artist’s own body of work.

7. “The Art of Behaving Badly” by The Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous artist collective formed in 1985 in New York City. The collective is comprised of feminist artists who dedicate themselves to criticizing the patriarchal and oppressive contradictions of the art world, seeking to “expose gender and ethnic biases and corruption in art, film, politics and pop culture.”

Well known for their interventions, urban or otherwise, and protest art, most readers will probably be familiar with their groundbreaking Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into The MET. Museum? banner, but the Guerilla Girls also have quite a few books under their gorilla masks. In the 1990s, they tackled art history and its biases in The Guerilla Girls Beside Companion to the History of Western Art. They even wrote about the medical history of hysteria in The Hysterical Herstory of Hysteria and How It Was Cured: From Ancient Times Until Now (2016). Their latest book, Guerilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly is characteristically fun and subversive. The Art of Behaving Badly is a panorama of the collective’s impressive history, giving us insight into the past 35 years of art, activism and their always creative ways of fighting social biases.

8. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

With an artist as immortally famous as Frida Kahlo, it can be hard to distinguish fact from fiction and not get caught in myth-making. Much like Van Gogh’s letters, in Kahlo’s Diary, we get to see in a multimedia format the self-portraits of the likes of Frida Kahlo painted in life—and even deeper.

A collection of stunning illustrations, notes, musings, journals, and essays, The Diary of Frida Kahlo spans the last ten years in the life of the artist, a work that is both human and larger-than-life. Through both writings and drawings, we are brought into Frida Kahlo’s innermost thoughts. We flow through words about her art, her tumultuous marriage with fellow artist Diego Rivera, her feelings on her peers in the art world, her philosophy, politics, and her country, and we get deep insight into Kahlo’s humor, her pain, and resilience. The edition includes editing and a foreword by Carlos Fuentes, who provides further insight and reflections on Frida Kahlo’s history and legacy, as well as lesser-known illustrations painted by the artist.

Jane Frances Elgee was born on December 27, 1821, in Dublin, 20 years after Ireland lost its independence to Great Britain. Her parents were Charles Elgee and Sarah Kingsbury. She and her three siblings grew up in a middle-class Protestant household that was conservative and unionist. These were political views Jane would spend her adult life rebelling against.

Who Was Jane Wilde or Speranza?

Jane’s family was of English and Irish heritage, but she had a vivid imagination. She claimed to be of Italian heritage, stating that her last name was a corruption of Alighieri and that she was descended from Dante Alighieri himself. Jane Frances Elgee presented herself as Jane Francesa Elgee. Then she went one step further, writing under the pseudonym Speranza.

As a young girl, Speranza learned English, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and German. Over time, she added Spanish and Portuguese to her repertoire. These languages proved useful to Speranza’s work as a translator and writer.

Though not well-traveled, knowing many languages meant Speranza could situate the struggle for Irish freedom within the larger context of independence movements spreading across Europe in the 1830s, but her broad horizons did not quite extend so far as to champion the cause of abolitionism in the US, and in fact, she was a Confederate sympathizer. Her brother, Confederate Judge John Kingsbury Elgee, not only enslaved men and women in Louisiana, but he also signed Louisiana’s Order of Secession in 1861 and helped design Louisiana’s Confederate flag. Speranza’s nephew, Charles LeDoux Elgee, fought and died for the Confederacy. Speranza used slavery as a rhetorical device in her poems, writing with outrage about England’s enslavement of the Irish people. Yet she mustered neither outrage nor compassion for those who were enslaved in the United States.

“The Nation” and the Young Ireland Movement

Speranza translated poetry from German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese for a radical Irish political journal, The Nation. Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Osborne Davis, and John Blake Dillon were the three co-founders of The Nation. Duffy and Dillon were also the founders of the Young Ireland movement.

The Nation advocated against Britain’s colonial oppression of Ireland. It employed militant Irish nationalists like Mary Anne Kelly O’Doherty. Some writers for the journal were members of Young Ireland, a political movement that gave voice to the cause of Ireland’s independence from Great Britain. In choosing Young Ireland as the name for the movement, its founders were aligning themselves with other nationalist independence movements that emerged in Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, such as Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy, as well as Young Germany.

At the time Speranza wrote for The Nation, Ireland was in the grip of a devastating catastrophe. A fertile agricultural land, it exported wheat, oats, barley, and other crops to feed the people of other nations. Subsistence farmers, the Irish were dependent on the potato to feed their families. Other crops were sold to pay rent to absentee landlords. Speranza railed against these landlords and the misery they caused in her poem, “The Faithless Shepherds.”

The Famine Poems

A blight struck the potato in 1845, causing crop failure. Over the next few years, the blight would haunt the Irish farmers, returning and causing additional crop failures, and then a typhus epidemic struck the country in 1847. The Whig-led Westminster government in Britain took a non-interventionist approach to the catastrophe, one that aligned with its laissez-faire economic policy. Over the next ten years, more than a million Irish men, women, and children died of starvation and famine fever. Another million fled to Liverpool. An additional two million Irishmen emigrated to the United States to avoid starvation.

The tragedy of the Potato Famine would be the impetus behind Speranza’s Famine poems. As the conditions of the Irish people became more dire, Speranza’s writing became more radical, seditious, and violent. Her poems were a cry of lamentation for her country and a call for divine judgment against Britain.

In “The Famine Year,” the poem opens with an account of the desperate plight of the Irish people and the reasons for their misery. The poem concludes with a warning saying that vengeance is coming, that it is unavoidable, and it will come from God.

In the poems “France in ‘93” and “The Fall of Tyrants,” Speranza looks to the French Revolution as a model of what could take place in Ireland. Ultimately, she hoped that her writing would incite an Irish uprising against British rule, much like the French uprising against the nobility and clergy.

Jacta Alea Est

In 1848, while France was being convulsed by another revolution, Speranza’s most polemical piece of writing yet appeared in The Nation. The editorial was titled, “Jacta Alea Est.” No longer content with waiting for God’s judgment, the editorial called for an armed rebellion against the British. Speranza wrote:

The Irish nation has at length decided. England has done us good service at last. Her recent acts have taken away the last miserable pretext for passive submission. She has justified us before the world, and ennobled the timid, humble supplication of a degraded, insulted people, into the proud demand for independence, by a resolved, prepared, and fearless nation… Oh! for a hundred thousand muskets glittering brightly in the light of heaven…

 

Even as you read these weak words of a heart that yet palpitates with an enthusiasm as heroic as your own, and your breast heaves and your eyes grow dim with tears as the memory of Ireland’s wrongs rushes upon your soul – even now lift up your right hand to Heaven and swear – swear by your undying soul, and by your hopes of immortality, never to lay down your arms, never to cease hostilities, till you regenerate and save this fallen land.

By this point, The Nation’s office had already been raided by the government. Editor Charles Gavan Duffy was arrested and imprisoned for treason and sedition. After “Jacta Alea Est” was published, the editorial was incorrectly attributed to him. The editorial’s title, which means “the die is cast” in Latin, is a phrase that indicates a point of no return has been reached. The phrase was spoken by Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon. The government in Westminster then suspended Habeas Corpus, probably out of concern that Ireland might become part of the 1848 revolutionary wave.

Duffy was tried no less than six times. According to her own account of what transpired, Speranza attended Duffy’s trial. When Duffy was accused of writing “Jacta Alea Est,” Speranza stood up and claimed authorship, making herself a public figure, which women in the Victorian Era were not supposed to be. Rather than prosecute a woman, the court dropped the charge.

The Literary Salon and Mary Travers Scandal

With the trial behind her, Speranza continued working as a writer, poet, and translator. Her most influential work was the translation of J. W. Meinhold’s novel Sidonia von Bork. Retitled Sidonia the Sorceress, Speranza’s translation was read by a who’s-who of the art and literary world: Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti, novelist Charlotte Brontë, and literary critic Walter Pater all read it. Speranza’s influence would only continue to grow after her marriage to Dr. William Wilde and the founding of their literary salon at their home in Dublin. Speranza had three children with Dr. Wilde: William “Willie,” Oscar, and Isola. An unusual practice for the time, their children were welcomed at the weekly literary salon.

During this time, Mary Travers, a patient of Dr. Wilde who had become a family friend, was rapidly becoming an enemy by initiating a relentless campaign of harassment against the Wildes. After accusing Dr. Wilde of rape, she demanded money. When he refused to pay, Mary attempted to sabotage Dr. Wilde by creating private and public disturbances. She overdosed on laudanum at the Wilde’s home. She impersonated Dr. Wilde’s wife by writing damning pamphlets about him under the name Speranza. She even followed Speranza from Dublin all the way to Bray, a distance of 13 miles.

Finally, Speranza wrote a letter to Mary’s father informing him of her conduct. In response, Mary Travers sued Jane for libel and £2,000 in damages. The 1864 trial was covered by The Irish Times. The proceedings were at times theatrical and at other times farcical, but Speranza won in the court of public opinion. Instead of £2,000 in damages, Mary Travers was awarded one farthing, which amounted to one quarter of a penny.

Jane as Lady Wilde

Ironically, the trial took place during the very same year that Dr. Wilde was knighted by the English Crown. This meant Speranza was now Lady Wilde.

Though a second trial was behind her now, the ensuing twelve years were difficult for Speranza. She lost both her daughter and her husband. Her eldest son, Willie, experienced financial difficulties due to his alcoholism. Dr. Wilde left the house she lived in to Willie, who sold it out from under his 58-year-old mother. Having no other recourse, Speranza had to relocate and work as a freelance writer.

After publishing the anti-English pamphlet The American Irish, she moved to London. There, she wrote articles for The Saint James’s Magazine, the Pall Mall Gazette, and other publications. She found a publisher for her books, like Driftwood from Scandinavia, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, and Notes on Men, Women and Books. She resumed her literary salon, which included among its guests George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Eleanor Marx, Robert Browning, as well as her son, Oscar. She also invited Jefferson Davis, the defeated and disgraced former President of the Confederate States of America, to her home.

Jane Wilde and Oscar Wilde’s Trial

Oscar helped his mother financially over the years. By this point, his literary career outshone his mother’s. However, his fall was imminent. Oscar was in a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensberry. This enraged the Marquess, who then provoked Oscar into suing him for libel. The trial did not go as Oscar had hoped. Queensberry was found not guilty.

Oscar was arrested and charged with “gross indecency,” but Speranza never abandoned him. While Oscar was out on bail, no establishment would rent him a room. He ended up staying in his mother’s small apartment. Found guilty, Oscar was sentenced to two years of hard labor in prison. Speranza would never see her son again. She died one year later in 1896.

Like many veterans, Kurt Vonnegut was disillusioned by his experiences in World War II. The firebombing of Dresden in 1945 proved particularly influential on Vonnegut’s writing. He could no longer rely on traditional literature to adequately explain modern life. Instead, he filled his novels with time-traveling veterans, lethal futuristic inventions, and indifferent alien races to critique modern life. Across some of his most famous works, such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, Player Piano, and Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut used science fiction not as escapism from society, but as a means of critiquing its contradictions and absurdities.

Why Absurdity Served as the Ultimate Weapon Against Post-War Conformity

The economic prosperity of post-World War II America in the 1950s encouraged Americans to embrace consumer culture, pursue a romanticized suburban lifestyle, and put their faith in institutions. Meanwhile, the Cold War loomed in the background with the threat of nuclear war. A society that claimed technology could improve life via consumer appliances, cars, television, and space exploration could also create the possibility of destroying civilization. Rather than search for explanations or moral certainty in a culture that celebrated individual freedom while encouraging conformity, Vonnegut embraced a worldview in which the universe was indifferent to human concerns. His fiction was punctuated by catastrophic events, acts of random suffering, and cosmic indifference, all blended with dark humor. Vonnegut was not merely expressing hopelessness, but creating a coping mechanism.

Through absurdism, Vonnegut enabled readers to confront bleak realities without succumbing to despair. Traditional literary realism failed at this. The horrors of World War II, the atomic bomb, and a bureaucratic system responsible for mass destruction challenged conventional assumptions about human progress and rationality. These topics could not be translated with traditional literary techniques, like a linear narrative, chronological timeline, and coherent protagonist. Realism had the capacity to detail events. Yet, it failed to capture their true absurdity. Vonnegut turned to science fiction and speculative storytelling techniques. Time travel. Alien races. Imagined technologies. All of these topics permitted Vonnegut to explore truths around war, conformity, and human behavior that traditional literary realism alone was unable to fully express.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” Weaponized Alien Abduction to Process Real Wartime Trauma

Drawing inspiration from his personal experiences as a prisoner of war following the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 during World War II, Slaughterhouse-Five follows the life of Billy Pilgrim, a fatalistic American soldier and chaplain’s assistant. In the novel, Billy becomes “unstuck in time,” moving unpredictably through time between moments from his past, present, and future.

The Tralfamadorians are central to the novel. They are an alien species from the planet Tralfamadore who possess the power to see in four dimensions, simultaneously viewing all moments in the space-time continuum. They universally adopt a fatalistic worldview. Death means nothing to them. It is not an end, but merely a fixed moment rendering them emotionally neutral. This philosophy is encapsulated in the repetitive phrase “so it goes,” which follows every mention of death in the novel.

The Tralfamadorians function as a metaphor reflective of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Billy Pilgrim’s distorted perception of time is representative of a mind trapped in the past and present, unable to fully escape trauma. This is much like the experiences of soldiers returning from war who involuntarily re-experience violent or distressing memories outside of chronological order. By imagining a perspective in which all events are predetermined and equally insignificant, Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorians to undermine religious and philosophical narratives that seek to justify the horrors of war.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, soldiers are not portrayed as disciplined heroes, but as frightened and confused individuals caught in systems beyond their control. Vonnegut critiques both the experience of combat and the systems that romanticize it afterward. The novel opposes traditional narratives and patriotic rhetoric by presenting war as chaotic and arbitrary, where instances of bravery are accidental or ultimately insignificant.

“Cat’s Cradle” Exposed the Deadly Hubris of Unchecked Scientific Progress

Vonnegut extends his critique by satirizing the ethical responsibility of the scientific community during the nuclear arms race in his novel, Cat’s Cradle. The novel suggests that scientific progress operates independently of moral responsibility, with technological advancements operating with little regard for human survival.

Ice-Nine is a fictitious substance capable of freezing any liquid water it comes into contact with. It was created by Felix Hoenikker, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was depicted as amoral and detached towards anything other than his own research. Ice-Nine is therefore a symbol of technological advancements devoid of ethical constraints. After an airplane crash causes a palace cliff to collapse, the frozen body of dictator Papa Monzano—who had committed suicide by ingesting Ice-Nine—falls into the ocean, instantly freezing the world’s waters.

Similarly, Ice-Nine functions as an absurdist extension of the threat of the Cold War and anxieties revolving around nuclear weapons. Like the atomic bomb, Ice-Nine represented a point of no return. The novel’s bleak conclusion is representative of Vonnegut’s concerns that scientific detachment and institutional competition could inadvertently cause global annihilation without deliberate intent.

Other than critiquing the scientific community, Vonnegut introduces a fictional religion known as Bokononism, the native religion on the island of San Lorenzo. It is based on the ideology of enjoying life through the belief in harmless untruths. Followers of Bokononism therefore find comfort in narratives that provide meaning and structure in an otherwise chaotic world.

This invented faith allows Vonnegut to satirize both institutional religion and political ideology. In doing so, Vonnegut raises a broader question throughout the novel: are the scientific, religious, and political systems constructed by humans a tool for understanding reality, or simply mechanisms that help them survive reality?

Dismantling the American Dream Through Techno-Pessimism in “Player Piano”

Unlike later critiques of war and scientific advancements, Vonnegut’s debut novel, Player Piano, critiques the structure of industrial capitalism. The novel is set in a dystopia in which automation systems have allowed factories to operate with only a few human laborers. This creates a divide between the upper class, engineers, and managers who keep society afloat, and the lower class, who have been replaced by machines.

While automation is presented as a means of improving productivity and reducing human effort, Vonnegut critiques its social consequences. The novel’s protagonist, Dr. Paul Proteus, is the manager of Ilium Works, a highly automated manufacturing complex in the fictional city of Ilium, New York. Despite his status, Paul becomes increasingly dissatisfied with a system that measures human worth according to technical usefulness, leaving large numbers of the population redundant or reassigned to meaningless roles. The dissatisfaction Paul experiences is heightened when he visits the “Homestead” section of Ilium, where workers replaced by machines live out their lives in mass-produced houses without purpose, dignity, or class mobility.

Contemporary anxieties revolving around artificial intelligence and the devaluation of human worth mimic the concerns Vonnegut raised in Player Piano decades prior. Consequently, a society that worships efficiency risks eliminating the very human value it claims to enhance. This danger is embodied in Paul, who, despite holding a high status, becomes increasingly alienated, ultimately leading to his arrest and trial. Vonnegut illustrates how a society centered around machines treats dissent as a threat. This suggests that technological progress alone is unable to provide meaning and that a civilization valuing efficiency over everything else risks reducing human beings to expendable components in a larger system.

“Breakfast of Champions” Targeted Commercialism and Mental Illness in Free Markets

By the time Vonnegut published Breakfast of Champions, his critique of modern society had expanded beyond war, science, and automation to encompass American consumer culture itself. Throughout the novel, Vonnegut inserts himself into the narrative, includes his own illustrations, and repeatedly draws attention to the artificiality of fiction by referencing his other works.

The novel follows the lives of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout, a car salesman and struggling science fiction writer, respectively. Trout is widely considered Vonnegut’s literary alter ego. Despite publishing hundreds of novels and short stories, Trout believes himself to be a largely unknown writer, making a living from installing aluminum storm windows. Trout is representative of Vonnegut’s beliefs that ideas and messages are often overlooked because of the medium through which they are delivered. This emphasizes how capitalism devalues creative human labor. Trout is so alienated from his own work that he is completely unaware that anyone reads or values his stories.

Dwayne Hoover, however, is a wealthy business owner. Despite the idea of success Hoover possesses, he is left mentally unstable because of how capitalism has decimated his sense of purpose. After meeting Trout, Hoover reads one of his novels, believing it to be reality. He becomes convinced he is the only being in the universe with free will and that everyone else is a robot. This belief turns Hoover violent, causing him to injure his son, secretary, and Kilgore Trout. Hoover’s deteriorating mental health suggests that prosperity alone cannot provide fulfillment, particularly within a culture that prioritizes consumption over human connection.

Therefore, Breakfast of Champions ultimately stresses that the greatest threats to humanity are not alien invasions or futuristic technologies, but the destructive impulses embedded in everyday society. Vonnegut’s absurdist science fiction was never about predicting the future as much as it was about exposing the flaws of the present for readers to confront before they became impossible to ignore.

Few writers have shaped modern horror and mystery as profoundly as Edgar Allan Poe. Best known for his macabre and mysterious tales, Poe helped pioneer detective fiction and psychological horror while crafting some of the most haunting poems in American literature.

Born in 1809—the same year as Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin—Poe was a talented writer and editor with a keen interest in science, literature, and language. Although he is often remembered for dark Gothic stories, his work ranged widely in style and subject. The following four works offer an ideal introduction to the imagination and influence of the master of the macabre.

Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe?

Edgar Allan Poe was a versatile writer and editor, but the macabre elements of his Gothic horror stories often overshadow the full range of his work. Here are a few reasons why his writing is still worth reading today:

• He wrote more than horror stories.
  Poe experimented with satire, science, and detective fiction. In Some Words with a Mummy, an awakened mummy argues that his ancient civilization already achieved what modern scholars claim as progress. Poe is also credited with inventing the detective story through his character Auguste C. Dupin, who later influenced Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes.
• His poems are hauntingly beautiful.
  Poe’s poems are miniature worlds filled with atmosphere, imagery, and lyricism. He reaches deep into the human experience and pours emotion into his verse.
• His stories can be read in one sitting.
  Poe believed a story should be read in a single sitting to savor the experience in a measured dose. His stories are short, but every word carries weight and works together to deliver a punch.
• He understood that being human is complex.
  Poe’s stories often highlight human flaws and darker impulses. Many can be read as small lessons about morality and the forces that shape human behavior.

1. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)

Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket at a time when his short stories were not bringing him much success. The novel—his only complete one—allowed him to demonstrate his range as a writer. Although it was not warmly received by critics, it remains an important work in Poe’s development.

The story follows Arthur Gordon Pym’s increasingly surreal adventures at sea. After sneaking aboard his friend Augustus’s father’s ship, the Grampus, as a stowaway, Pym becomes caught in a violent mutiny that leaves only a handful of survivors. With the help of the mysterious sailor Dirk Peters, the survivors briefly regain control of the ship but soon face starvation, storms, and desperate choices.

After being rescued by the crew of the Jane Guy, Pym and Peters continue their voyage southward, exploring remote islands and strange landscapes. Their journey eventually leads them toward the South Pole, where they encounter eerie phenomena—milky waters, drifting ash, and thick mist.

The novel ends abruptly when a mysterious white figure appears before them, leaving readers with one of the most enigmatic endings in American literature. In a postscript, Poe’s fictional editors claim that Pym was lost in an accident before completing his narrative, adding to the story’s enduring mystery.

2. The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Poe’s most famous works, alongside The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart. The story follows an unnamed narrator who visits his sick friend, Roderick Usher, at the family’s remote mansion. Roderick believes the house is alive and that its fate is tied to his own.

When Roderick’s sister Madeline is believed dead and entombed beneath the house, strange events soon unfold. On a stormy night, the twin siblings are reunited in a deadly climax: Madeline collapses on Roderick, killing them both, and the narrator flees as the mansion splits and sinks into the surrounding waters.

Scholars have long debated the story’s meanings. The mansion may symbolize a fractured psyche, Roderick and Madeline represent dual aspects of a single identity, or the tale may hint at vampirism or occult practices. Some even interpret Egyptian mythology in which Madeline embodies Osiris and Roderick Isis, reflecting a close, almost consanguineous bond.

Roderick’s bizarre library—full of real, obscure works on the occult, science, and philosophy—underscores Poe’s erudition. Professor Thomas Olive Mabbott noted that these texts reveal Poe’s genuine knowledge in a field where he was often dismissed as quackish.

The story’s enduring appeal lies in its ambiguity. Modern adaptations, like Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series, weave Usher together with other Poe tales, celebrating its dark, cautionary power. Scholars still debate: did Poe intend a straightforward story, or a masterpiece meant to defy interpretation?

3. The Raven (1845)

Although The Raven catapulted Edgar Allan Poe to national prominence and became a household name, it did not bring him much financial success. The poem is often praised for its musical, highly stylized language and its supernatural, melancholic atmosphere. It tells the story of a scholar mourning the loss of his beloved Lenore, whose encounter with a raven marks his slow descent into madness and despair.

Poe used the poem in his essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846) to illustrate his theories of writing. He emphasized the importance of a story’s length, the unity of effect, and the logical planning of each detail. According to Poe, “the death of a beautiful woman” is the ultimate poetic topic, and he crafted The Raven around this principle. Every element—from the stormy night to the raven’s perch on a bust of Pallas, goddess of wisdom—was deliberately chosen to heighten the poem’s mood and meaning.

Poe also intended the poem to appeal to both popular and critical tastes. Its careful structure, symbolic imagery, and repeated refrain “Nevermore” illustrate the narrator’s fixation on loss and inability to move forward. The raven becomes a powerful symbol of grief, memory, and obsession, haunting the narrator and reminding him of his endless sorrow.

The Raven has inspired countless artists, from Gustave Doré’s final illustrations in 1883 to modern references in popular culture, including The Simpsons. Its blend of dark lyricism, narrative tension, and philosophical depth ensures its enduring place in literary history.

4. Some Words with a Mummy (1845)

Some Words with a Mummy is a satirical short story that critiques the Egyptomania craze of Victorian England and, to a lesser extent, the United States. With most knowledge of Egypt limited to art, architecture, and literature, the culture was shrouded in exoticism, mysticism, and fanciful myths. Poe lampoons these misconceptions while exploring human arrogance and cultural superiority.

The story follows an unnamed narrator who, after a dinner of Welsh rabbit and stout, witnesses the unwrapping of a perfectly preserved mummy, Allamistakeo, at Doctor Ponnoner’s home. When the men apply electricity to examine him, the mummy awakens and quickly asserts his superiority over modern humans. He mocks their monotheism, their belief in progress, and even shares his own views on human creation through spontaneous generation.

Despite his intellectual dominance, Allamistakeo finally admits defeat when confronted with the men’s knowledge of manufactured lozenges and pills. The encounter leaves the narrator uncertain whether he dreamed the episode or truly conversed with a mummy. Disillusioned with his own time, he whimsically resolves to be embalmed like an ancient Egyptian, to witness humanity’s future advancements.

Poe blends humor, satire, and philosophical reflection in this short story, making it both an entertaining tale and a sharp commentary on human pride, curiosity, and the allure of the past.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Legacy

It is unfair to label Poe simply as depressed or brooding. He suffered tremendous losses—his mother, Eliza Poe, and his wife, Virginia Clemm, died of consumption, and his childhood under John Allan was often difficult. He also faced money troubles and literary enemies, the most notorious being Rufus Griswold, whose vicious obituary damaged Poe’s reputation for years.

We should remember Edgar Allan Poe for his literary legacy, his brilliant mind, and his insight into the human condition—its good and evil. As one journalist remarked, “Mr. Poe is not merely a man of science—not merely a poet—not merely a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more…”

Although they never even formally identified themselves as a group, the Romantic poets in early-19th-century English literature have cast a collective spell over readers for generations. Traditionally comprising six core poets—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats—the Romantics gave us some of the best-loved poetry in English, as well as leading tantalizingly unconventional lives. These men, along with numerous larger-than-life figures with whom they intersected, have long been the targets of thorny mythologies. Time to untangle a few.

1. Lord Byron Was the First Vampire

This one is quite obviously a myth. Vampires, in some shape or form, long predate the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (born in London in 1788) in the folklore of several cultures, including the Slavic, Celtic, Aztec, and West African. Of course, Byron was not the first, nor was he a vampire at all.

Yet an association sprang up between vampires and this famously “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” poet for a few reasons. (The phrase is attributed to his lover Lady Caroline Lamb.) Before his exile from Britain, Byron lived at his ancestral home, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

His family background and childhood were the stuff of Gothic fiction: seafaring adventures, madness, affairs, and abuse abounded. By the time he took up residence at the dusty and dilapidated Newstead, aged 20, he was as disillusioned and prone to withdrawal as many a Gothic protagonist.

Multiple primary sources confirm that he drank from a cup made out of a human skull retrieved from the graveyard at Newstead—a rumor he certainly didn’t discourage by writing the poem Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull. A strange practice, to be sure, but still not enough to make one a vampire.

What we can claim is that Byron was the first literary vampire as we know it. During the infamous ghost story contest in Geneva, which led Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, wrote a story about his patient, which was later published as The Vampyre.

Its central character, the suave, threatening Lord Ruthven, bears more than a passing resemblance to Byron: pale, aristocratic, maintaining an acceptable façade while preying on beautiful high-society women. This image of the vampire has stuck, transforming the creature from its folkloric roots for good.

2. John Keats Was Killed by a Bad Review

Some of these myths have their roots in scurrilous gossip propagated while the poets were alive. Some sprang up after their deaths, when they were unable to put the record straight, put about by people who never even knew them. In the case of the rumor that Keats died as a result of his poetry being badly reviewed, the rumor mill was set in motion by another Romantic poet: Lord Byron.

It is true that Keats was subject to criticism (from Byron and others) throughout his short poetic career (only five years elapsed between his first published poem, in 1816, and his death in 1821, aged just 25). The more elitist figures in the literary world felt that Keats, orphaned son of a London ostler, lacked the refinement to craft beautiful—or even grammatically correct—poetry. In 1817, Blackwood’s Magazine attacked Keats, along with his politically radical friend Leigh Hunt, as a member of the Cockney School of poetry.

Privately, Byron excoriated Keats’s frequent poetic exploration of dreaming, sleep, and the subconscious, using a vivid masturbatory metaphor: “he is always f—gg—g his imagination.” This might have been particularly galling to Keats had he ever gotten wind of it, since the young poet had modeled himself on Byron, louche unbuttoned shirt and all, early in his career.

That was 1820. By 1823, when Keats had been dead two years, Byron published the following lines in Canto 11 of his long narrative poem Don Juan:

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,

Just as he really promised something great […]

Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate:–

‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,

Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

Byron referred to the negative reviews of Endymion (1818), Keats’s first book-length poem, which was labeled “nonsense” and “driveling idiocy” in Tory reviews such as Blackwood’s and The Quarterly Review. Of course, these reviews upset Keats, and (as well as a pragmatic consideration of the difficulties of making money from writing poetry) made him contemplate a return to his former profession in medicine.

Keats’s doctor even advised him to stop writing poetry, such was the mental distress it seemed to be causing him. However, a far more significant factor in his death was tuberculosis, which had killed his mother. Keats nursed his brother Tom when he too succumbed to the disease, and this is likely how he became ill himself. Following the doctor’s orders, he traveled south to take in the Mediterranean air, but died just a few months after arriving in Rome.

Still, even a poet more sympathetic to Keats than Byron fueled the myth. Percy Shelley, who had had a friendly correspondence with Keats and invited him to his house in Pisa when he became seriously ill, wrote the elegy Adonais in 1821. While valiantly and touchingly claiming Keats’s place in the pantheon, Adonais presents Keats as a victim of not tuberculosis, but cruel mortal fame.

3. William Blake Was Tried for Anti-Monarchist Brawling

Many Romantic poets remain heroes to anyone interested in radical or progressive political thought: whether Wordsworth for his early support of the French Revolution, Shelley for his endorsement of civil disobedience in The Masque of Anarchy (written in 1819 following the Peterloo Massacre, and containing the line “Ye are many – they are few”), or William Blake for the visionary and anarchist strains in his poetry.

Many will know Blake’s poem London, which decries the deprivation and misery forced on people living side by side with the rich elite; his anti-industrialist invocation of “dark satanic mills” in Jerusalem; or several other poems detailing the hardships of industrial life, especially for children, in the collection Songs of Innocence.

In 1803, an incident occurred that heightened Blake’s reputation as a radical. Blake was at this time living in Sussex with his wife, Catherine. (Their artistically collaborative marriage, along with his writing about true love, which is trammeled by 19th-century marriage conventions, made Blake a champion for advocates of free love from the late 19th century onwards). Finding a British soldier, John Schofield, trespassing, possibly drunkenly, in his garden one day, Blake forcefully ejected him, with a cry—according to Schofield—of “Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves.”

The case went to trial in early 1804, with Blake accused of sedition or inciting revolt. Attacking a soldier and insulting the monarch would have been all the more incendiary at this time, when Britain was at war with France. However, Blake was ultimately acquitted. With no witnesses to the event, it looked as if Schofield might have put words in the poet’s mouth.

Yet the story remains a compelling chapter in Blake’s life because, though spurious, the allegation has a grain of truth: Blake certainly did rail against unjust authority and held strongly pro-abolitionist views. His subsequent poetry touched on wrongful accusers and judges, and one of his drawings for the book-length poem Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-20; Blake and his wife designed and illustrated all of his books themselves) features a character named Skofeld, bent double, in chains.

4. Lord Byron Committed Incest

As mentioned above, Byron left Britain in 1816, never to return. It’s fair to say he left under a cloud. Despite being one of the bestselling poets of the period, he was beset with debt. His wife, Annabella, had left him, taking their daughter, Ada (later Lovelace), and accusing him of numerous affairs, marital cruelty, and insanity. Rumors were swirling about an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh—his wife even cited this during divorce proceedings.

Many of his wife’s allegations can be proven true. His affair with Lady Caroline Lamb had taken place before his marriage, though after hers. Once married to Caroline’s cousin Annabella, he continued to have affairs with various women, harassed her during her pregnancy, and possibly subjected her to anal sex without her consent (at the time, even consensual anal sex was a crime).

It is worth noting that Byron’s view of love and sexuality was affected by having been sexually abused by women and men, possibly as young as the age of eight. Moreover, Byron had deep romantic and sexual attachments to boys and young men during his education at Harrow and Cambridge. He may have also sought out the Grand Tour, then self-exile in Italy, partly because European mores as regards homosexuality were less restrictive.

As for Augusta Leigh, we know that they were emotionally close in the couple of years prior to Byron’s marriage to Annabella. Lord Byron would get her invited to social events where the two would withdraw to a quiet corner, heads bowed, absorbed in one another. He also felt she understood him like no one else. It’s possible the relationship went no further. Our source for their having had a physical relationship is Annabella, who sought sufficient grounds to divorce Byron and gain custody of Ada, and whose own source was her cousin Caroline, whose own relationship with Byron had ended badly, to say the least.

Then again, when Augusta gave birth to a daughter in 1814, Byron went immediately to see her and wrote to a friend noting: “it is not an ‘Ape’ and if it is – that must be my fault.” Was Byron referring to the idea that a child born of incest would be deformed? Having grown up with a club foot, he was especially conscious of perceived deformity, and perhaps worried about passing it on to any offspring. Critics remain divided on this myth, some believing Augusta’s daughter to be Byron’s, others arguing that we can only definitively view the relationship as platonic.

5. Mary Shelley Kept the Heart of Her Dead Husband

Here we have two myths in one: that Percy Shelley’s heart survived cremation after his drowned body was washed ashore in Italy, and that his widow Mary kept it for the remainder of her life.

Our source for the first is Edward John Trelawny, a somewhat swashbuckling figure who became attached to the Shelleys during their time in Pisa in 1822. (Like Byron, the Shelleys had gone into voluntary exile from Britain to escape debts and family scandal.) Historians have found Trelawny unreliable and prone to exaggeration, but he was undoubtedly close to both the Shelleys and Byron at important periods of their lives.

Some six months after Trelawny met the Shelleys, Percy drowned when his ship, the Don Juan, sank (some say this was because of a storm, while Trelawny puts it down to pirates, something he did know plenty about). When Shelley’s body washed up on the coast near Livorno, Trelawny identified it—allegedly, one identifying factor was a book of Keats’s poetry in his jacket pocket.

Trelawny, Byron, and Leigh Hunt then took care of arrangements for the body’s cremation on the beach at Viareggio (contrary to the painting of the scene by Louis Édouard Fournier, Mary Shelley was not present). Trelawny describes the burning in detail—though the exact details differ across his various accounts—and crucially claims that, after Byron and Hunt had left him alone by the fire, he reached inside and took out Shelley’s heart.

According to Trelawny, the heart “was still perfect” and “would not burn,” even as Shelley’s bones were being reduced to ashes, some three hours into the cremation. Such a miracle was certainly a tantalizing idea for those looking to sanctify the poet after his untimely death.

Some speculate that his heart had calcified as a result of earlier tuberculosis, though scientists have cast doubt on this. Others suggest that it was his liver, fortified by the drowning process. Still others believe that Trelawny lied about how far into the cremation he reached into the flames and took out the heart, to aggrandize the story’s remarkability—perhaps it was earlier, when the heart was indeed intact.

Yet the second part of the myth is more certain. Whatever Trelawny pulled out of the flames, he gave it to Hunt, who had begged to keep it. Thanks to Byron’s intervention, Mary convinced Hunt to surrender this last token of Shelley (not, in this period, an unusual thing for a loved one to keep). Mary wrapped the heart, or whatever it may have been, in pages from Adonais, Shelley’s paean to the late Keats, and kept it in a box on her desk. This was only found after her death in 1851 and was buried along with her at St. Peter’s Church, Bournemouth.