René Magritte was a Belgian surrealist painter who lived from 1898 to 1967. He was concerned with the “sensation of mystery” in art and was in his own words, “the son of the woman who drowned herself.” As a child, he lived with his father and brothers, who were entrusted to the care of nurses and governesses. As a boy, he was said to have an “already strongly marked sense of the bizarre.” Here are three of his paintings:

The Therapist (1937), Le thérapeute, oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm

The Companions of Fear (1942), Les compagnons de la peur, oil on canvas 70.4 x 92 cm

The Human Condition (1935), La condition humaine, oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

Carl Sandburg won the Pulitzer for his book of Complete Poems.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) won the Pulitzer for her book: Annie Allen

my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.
………………………………………

Kitchenette Building

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” mate, a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent”, “feeding a wife”, “satisfying a man”.

But could a dream sent up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms,

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

Peter Viereck (1916-2006) won the Pulitzer for his book: Terror and Decorum

Which Of Us Two?

When both are strong with tenderness, too wild
With oneness to be severance-reconciled;
When even the touch of fingertips can shock
Both to such seesaw mutuality
Of hot-pressed opposites as smelts a tree
Tighter to its dryad than to its own tight bark;
When neither jokes or mopes or hates alone
Or wakes untangled from the other; when
More-warm-than-soul, more-deep-than-flesh are one
In marriage of the very skeleton;–

When, then, soil peels mere flesh off half this love
And locks it from the unstripped half above,
Who’s ever sure which side of soil he’s on?
Have I lain seconds here, or years like this?
I’m sure of nothing else but loneliness
And darkness. Here’s such black as stuffs a tomb,
Or merely midnight in an unshared room.
Holding my breath for fear my breath is gone,
Unmoving and afraid to try to move,
Knowing only you have somehow left my side,

I lie here, wondering which of us has died.

W. H. Auden (1907-1973) won the Pulitzer for his book: The Age of Anxiety

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel (1525-1569). Icarus is given a pair of wings made of feathers and wax by his father but warned not to fly too close to the sun. Overcome with joy while flying, Icarus soars too close to the sun which melts the wax. In this painting, one leg of Icarus can be seen in the water beside the stern of the ship.

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

……………………………………………………….

Here is another poem by Auden, O Tell Me The Truth About Love:

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) won the Pulitzer for his book: Lord Weary's Castle

Skunk Hour

For Elizabeth Bishop

Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she’s in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season’s ill–
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

Bishop and Lowell met at a dinner party in 1947 when she was 36 and he was 30 and corresponded for the next 30 years. Bishop said, “I remember thinking that it was the first time I had ever actually talked with some one about how one writes poetry—and thinking that it was, that it could be, strangely easy. Like exchanging recipes for making a cake."

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall,
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl,
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull,
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,
‘Love, O careless Love . . . .’ I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell,
nobody’s here–

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air–
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) won the Pulitzer for his book: V-Letter and Other Poems

The Voyage

The ship of my body has danced in the dance of the storm
And pierced to the center the heavy embrace of the tide;
It has plunged to the bottomless trough with the knife of its form
And leapt with the prow of its motion elate from the bride.

And now in the dawn I am salt with the taste of the wave,
Which lies with itself and suspires, her beauty alseep,
And I peer at the fishes with jaws that devour and rave
And hunt in her dream for the wrack of our hands in the deep.

But the wind is the odor of love that awakes in the sun
The stream of our voyage that lies on the belt of the seas,
And I gather and breathe in the rays of the darkness undone,
And drift in her silence of morning and sail at my ease,

Where sponges and rubbery seaweeds and flowers of hair
Uprooted abound in the water and choke in the air.

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943) won the Pulitzer for his book: Western Star

Stephen Vincent Benét was the younger brother of William Rose Benét, who won the Pulitzer in 1942. This was the second Pulitzer for Stephen, who won the award in 1929 for John Brown’s Body. He died of a heart attack in 1943 and was awarded the second Pulitzer posthumously.

The following excerpt is from an article published in 1944 in The English Journal by Edward Anderson on Stephen’s unfinished epic poem Western Star:

“In a year when so many great events are capturing our daily attention, the passing of a poet, even of so distinguished a one as Stephen Vincent Benét, is likely to escape the full notice which we might otherwise accord it. If any American poet of the twentieth century deserves to be called a true spokesman of the American spirit, that poet is certainly Benét…. Benét’s Western Star is no blind panegyric, no attempt to assure us that the Jamestown and Plymouth colonists were all noble-souled idealists, bent either on furthering the glory of the British Empire or the exercise of religious freedom. Benét studied the records of these two first English plantings on our Atlantic shores and brings into his verse narrative the merchant-prince motivated by jealousy and the desire for gain, Sir Thomas Smythe, the governor of the India Company, who sent the Jamestown colonists forth, telling them and the English backers of the expedition tales of the fabulous gold to be found. The poet tells us also of Sir Gilbert Hay, the outcast courtier, gambler, and rascal who typified some of those who flocked to American shores in the early years of our English settlements. The poet tells with a touching dignity of Matthew Lanyard, the convert to Puritan doctrine, and of his second wife, Katherine, the very type of Puritan narrowness and strength, who came to Plymouth on the “Mayflower”; but he tells also of the hearty old sinner, Mother Billington, erstwhile midwife in Aldgate Ward, and her no-account son, Jacky, who dies a murderer’s death on the Plymouth gallows. Benét makes a point of reminding us in one place of the fact that only thirty-five of the one hundred and one passengers on the “Mayflower” were Puritans; the remainder were composed of the good, the bad, and the indifferent, lured from the streets of London or the country shires by restlessness, by earnest desire to better themselves, or by some personal wish for escape.”

Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

In 1929, Stephen published the short story The Devil and Daniel Webster about a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the devil and is defended by Daniel Webster, a real-life politician who served in the Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives and as Secretary of State.

Here is a clip from a cartoon animation of that story:

Robert Frost (1874-1963) won the Pulitzer for his book: The Witness Tree

Where my imaginary line
Bends square in woods, an iron spine
And pile of real rocks have been founded.
And off this corner in the wild,
Where these are driven in and piled,
One tree, by being deeply wounded,
Has been impressed as Witness Tree
And made commit to memory
My proof of being not unbounded.
Thus truth’s established and borne out,
Though circumstanced with dark and doubt–
Though by a world of doubt surrounded.

William Rose Benét won the Pulitzer for his book: The Dust Which Is God

People

I was painting dolphins on a silver sea
When a genial, jawful upstart came to me.
“Poof!” he cried. “A rum thing!
I foretell your fate.
Give the people something
They’ll appreciate!
People want the vital. People love the real.
Hence—your just requital! You are too ideal.
No one does as you do. Wise they grow—and rich!”

All I crooned was “Who do? Who do which?”

An illustration from "Mother Goose," edited by Benét

While my clarion shattered dawn’s resplendent gold,
Hobbled up a tattered grandsire, glum and old.
Cackling “Lawksadaisy!”
Stood awhile, and spat.
Then he said “You’re, crazy!
What’s the good of that?
People want the mellow. People prize the mild.
You are but a yellow journal’s jaundiced child.
Fervor for the few does. Wiser heads say ‘Tut!’ “

All I smiled was “Who does? Who does what?”

Where my purple vastures know not days or hours,
In celestial pastures picking stars for flowers,
Midway through my revel, of his own accord,
Popped a little devil up through heavenly sward.
“Lord! Is this your fashion? How you’re wasting time!
People pine for passion mixed with their sublime.
People are romantic. People love to pry. …”
Then I froze that antic devil with my eye.
Then I pounced upon him. Then I hurled him high
Crimsonly careering down the whirling sky,
Sputtering “You—you—you will hear from me again!”

“Whoo-oop!” I bellowed. “Who will? Who will? When?”