Gertrude stein brief biography of maya

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all,” Maya Angelou told Bill Moyers in their fantastic forgotten conversation about freedom. Beneath the surface of this paradoxical sentiment is a kind of koan, simple yet profound, replete with layered truth for those of us living expatriated lives — expatriated from a place or a culture, in space or in time.

Two generations before Angelou, Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874–July 27, 1946), living out her great love story as an American expatriate in Paris, addressed this paradox with uncommon insight and her own characteristic koan-like style in a passage from her 1940 novel Paris France (public library).

Stein — Jewish and gay, writing while the world was coming undone by warring nationalisms and gas chambers disbelonging human beings from life itself — observes:

Everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

Stein notes that the Victorians found their romantic home in Italy, Americans found theirs in Spain in the first half of the nineteenth century and in England in the second, and her own generation found it in Paris. Prefiguring Angelou’s sentiment, she adds:

Of course sometimes people discover their own country as if it were the other… but in general that other country that you need to be free is in the other country not the country where you really belong.

I read this and think of Leonard Cohen’s lovely notion of poetry as “the Constitution of the inner country.” For me, living an unbelonging life in a country other than the one in which I was born and r

April is National Poetry Month, which celebrates the importance of poets and poetry.Today’s post comes from Thomas Richardson, an archives technician at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

The United States has a rich literary history with some of the most prolific poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. Their writings have fundamentally changed genres and introduced new ones as well. American poets write about nature, society, the human condition, religion, and many other topics that encapsulate the human experience. 

Four poets who profoundly affected American literature were Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Maya Angelou. Their works demonstrate a great command of the English language, social critiques of contemporary issues, express both romanticism and realism, and broke new ground in poetic structures and syntax. Their works have garnered both praise and controversy—sometimes for their content and for the poet’s personality

Walt Whitman, born in New York in 1819, worked for various newspapers, and in 1855 he published his first collection of poems, Leaves of Grass. His signature style was unconventional at the time, rejecting things like form structure. Controversy followed shortly after as many criticized its potentially sexual nature. Book sales were poor, but a ringing endorsement from Ralph Waldo Emerson encouraged Whitman to continue writing. 

During the U.S. Civil War, Whitman volunteered in Army hospitals to care for sick and wounded Union soldiers. During his routine duties he read to patients. He used this time to work on another collection of poems, entitled Drum-Taps. Following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Whitman wrote “O Captain! My Captain!” eulogizing the President and lamenting his loss. He was an avid supporter of Lincoln and the Union cause and is sometimes referred to as the “poet of democracy.” 

Whitman died in 1892 follow

Although Gertrude Stein is remembered as an innovative, somewhat outlandish American poet and writer of prose, she actually spent the last 43 years of her life as a leading light on the Paris art scene where she lived from 1903.  She was an avid collector or fine art and her salon in central Paris was well known as a meeting place for the “new moderns”, painters such as Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso. Stein saw in these new artists a raw talent that she tried hard to emulate in her writing.  Although she had a high regard for her own writing it was often seen as hard to fathom, often containing no discernible plot or rhythm.

She was born in Pennsylvania in February 1874, the youngest of five children in an upper class German-Jewish family.  Her father had made a fortune in railroad and streetcar investments.  The family relocated to Oakland, California when Gertrude was four years old.  While in her teenage years she lost both parents and her elder brother Michael assumed control over the family’s affairs, sending her to live with their mother’s family in Baltimore.

It was here that she first experienced the art world and the Saturday evening salons that she attended became her inspiration for what she created later in Paris.  At Radcliffe College, from the age of 19, she became a psychology student and embarked on experiments into Normal Motor Automatism. This was a study into how humans cope with two normal, intelligent activities at the same time, such as speaking out loud and writing.

She later stated that it was impossible for human beings to write “automatically” as it was far too complex an activity although a behavioural psychologist assessed her work Tender Buttons, written in 1934, as a possible example of “normal motor automatism”.  Stein produced work that was often said to represent the “stream of consciousness,” theory that was also attributed to later modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce

Gertrude Stein Quotes