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Show 246 MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER under the general heading, "The Literature of England." The 1958-61 were on "America's Literature." Madelyn's handwrit English literature series, a total of eighty-seven lectures or class presentations, covered all the leading writers in English history, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Wordsworth ten notes for the Masefield, and the many in-between. When she was teaching Shakespeare she often arranged for class members to represent different characters in the subject play and thus gave each to member of the class the opportunity of appearing in a Shakespearean production, of sorts. Her notes were filled with thoughtful quotations, questions, bits of philosophy, and appli cation to personal and family problems. When she introduced the Romantic Period in the fall of 1952, Madelyn quoted the following "for fun": Sir, I admit your general rule That every poet is a fool. But you yourself may serve to show it That every fool is not a poet. Swans sing before they die 'Twere no bad thing Should certain persons die before they sing. When she focused on the American literary scene, her twen ty-four lessons began with Puritan divines and women and moved on to Benjamin Franklin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Madelyn's aphorisms are memo rable, while her poetry excerpts are stimulating and challenging. (She never introduced her own poetry-was she bashful, self conscious, did she think her poetry was too personal, on the same order as a sacred personal experience?) Madelyn's lesson on "Some Puritan Women," given in January 1959, recounted the life story of Anne Bradstreet, who wrote the first woman's spiritual autobiography published in the New World.4 It appeared on the national scene in 1650 as "The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America," the author of "Severall Poems, compiled with great variety of Wit & not to mention many others. |
