orwell.

Shakespeare is out of the race dude. Face it.

Hey, ghug's guy won, and if he and the others say it's OK to slot Shakespeare back in where Stephenie Meyer was (and James Joyce will take the other slot) then that's what's going to happen.

Because seriously--Stephenie Fucking Meyer? O.o

Tell me you wouldn't rather 1. Have the whole Round of 64 here and 2. Have Shakespeare AND James Joyce rather than Stephenie Meyer.

I wish I'd have thought of that.

Anyway,

Eliot: 1
Orwell: 1

Reason for the Orwell vote, kasimax?

(And your PM remedy for fixing that Documents.library-ms issue worked, so thanks for that, +1!) :)

I'm going to side with Eliot here. Orwell in interesting, but Eliot was more enjoyable for me to come back to.

Eliot

The score so far:

Eliot: 3
Orwell: 1

i think both of these authors are too good to go out in the first round, so we should change the order so they both can go through. this only applies if orwell wins, if the guy i want to win wins, then it's fine, democracy y'know?

and not to bitch for a second, but it's a shame that noone nominated rousseau, father of romanticism, autobiographies, and generally top author.

We're doing fiction writers, Socrates (unless Rousseau wrote fiction?)

The only "exception" is Thoreau, but he wrote poetry, so I let that go...

If you wanted Rousseau and he wrote some fiction, you should've said something.

And hey, I wrote that Shakespeare lost, and was cool (if sad) leaving it that way...

Why are YOU pissed when the Vergil champion, ghug, is the guy who SUGGESTED we restart things this way?

You're fucking joking "Rousseau wrote fiction?" do you know anything about literature? *yes i know what your major for college was/is* jesus fucking christ - Rousseau wrote some of the best selling novels of the 18th century, and some of the most influential books for literature!

As a tangent from having a go at you for knowing nothing, you should look up his fiction and the influence it had.

I already had 4 people in alas =/ and after the election, even the person who nominated the victor shouldn't be able to take it back - imagine if someone that nominated Obama for the democratic candicy said let's not count the election he won - peoplewould shrug

Dissertation sur la musique moderne, 1736
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discours sur les sciences et les arts), 1750
Narcissus, or The Self-Admirer: A Comedy, 1752
Le devin du village: an opera, 1752, score PDF (21.7 MB)
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes), 1754
Discourse on Political Economy, 1755
Letter to M. D'Alembert on Spectacles, 1758 (Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles)
Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse), 1761
Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou de l'éducation), 1762
The Creed of a Savoyard Priest, 1762 (in Émile)
The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (Du contrat social), 1762
Four Letters to M. de Malesherbes, 1762
Pygmalion: a Lyric Scene, 1762
Letters Written from the Mountain, 1764 (Lettres de la montagne)
Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Les Confessions), 1770, published 1782
Constitutional Project for Corsica, 1772
Considerations on the Government of Poland, 1772
Essay on the Origin of Languages, published 1781 (Essai sur l'origine des langues)
Reveries of a Solitary Walker, incomplete, published 1782 (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire)
Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, published 1782

^It would seem as if most of those are NON-fiction in nature...

So you'll forgive me for thinking of him as most of us do, as a philosopher first rather than a literary author?

I should also mention that I am an ENGLISH major...

So yeah. We cover all of zero Rousseau. In two colleges so far.

I've read the man's philosophical works on my own time, but yeah, if you're going to attack me on the basis of my college major...

You may as well attack a French lit major for not being aware of the full canon of T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf.

"His sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism[1] and romanticism in fiction", i can find countless other references to Julie being one of if not THE reason that romanticism developed
and "Historian Robert Darnton has argued that Julie "was perhaps the biggest best-seller of the century".[1] Publishers could not print copies fast enough so they rented the book out by the day and even by the hour. According to Darnton, there were at least 70 editions in print before 1800, "probably more than for any other novel in the previous history of publishing"

so no, i don't forgive you - he was mainly a 'philosopher' (complicated title, he would have rejected, but we will say yes - it is also tough to say he was predominantly anything given his success across domains), but anyone that knows anything about romanticism (one of the biggest genres in literature) knows that Rousseau wrote fiction - or rather, should do.

i'm not attacking you for your major obi, i meant that as a counter to you pointing out you do english so know lots about literature. i accept that an english major does not need to know rousseau's fiction (although it helps, my high school mentioned it), but someone that loves/knows literature should know.

Well, I know and love lit, but don't know it all, for sure--

So thanks for the info...though I think it's fair to say in the English-speaking world he's mainly known as a philosopher (though you make a fair point about that being a problematic title here...since after all, the Parable of the Cave is, well, a parable, so you could make the argument for Plato's dialogues counting as "fiction" in the sense that he has fictional characters dialoguing...I would still call it philosophy, but yeah, it's a problematic title.)

In any case...anyone want to talk about Eliot or Orwell? :p

Eliot: 4
Orwell: 1

Again, both are pretty great. Not, you know, Vergil great, but maybe Shakespeare great. :P

As for Shakespeare being left in, it's kind of silly that the tournament was seeded the way it was. The NCAA never would have put Kentucky up against UConn in the first round. This way, we get more interesting competition, and Vergil autowins when they meet again in the finals.

Dude, it's the allegory of the cave. They mean exactly the same thing, but come on.

i'm over vergil and shakespeare, but the ncaa seeded kentucky 8 and uconn 7, so it was close to being a first round match up... but the ncaa seeind is for another thread

I vote Orwell. We shall not cease from exploration, but the end of all our exploring will be to have Big Brother screw with our head and kill us.

I vote Orwell as well.

Eliot: 4
Orwell: 3

And since we may as well talk about our contestants today rather than the seeding (since I think that's been beaten to death)...

To return to a point someone (was it you, Socrates?) raised about two of my 6 favorite authors having some Antisemitism in their works...

Well, to be fair--in a sense, 5/6 of them do.

Shakespeare...we talked about that...
Eliot...I will talk about that in a second...
D.H. Lawrence...died before Hitler, so we'll never know if his occasional insert about Jews was just your good old-fashioned garden variety of 1900s "Eh, use Jew as a pejorative" Antisemitism or something more...I like to hope and think he wouldn't have gone too far, but still...
George Bernard Shaw, who didn't hate the Jews but wasn't above slipping in a Jew-money connection in his anti-capitalism context...
Dostoyevsky, who...it's a long story...

Really the only one who I don't have to worry about too much at all is Virginia Woolf, who married a Jew and was pretty damn nice...so out of my 6 favorite authors, 5 weren't above taking a dig at the Jews in some fashion or another, to one extent or another...I don't know if that says more about authors who wrote pre-WWII or about Virginia Woolf as a pretty amazing (and very tragic) person.

But on Eliot and Antisemitism--

For Eliot, everything is tradition, and Jews were traditionally viewed as the antagonists in the Anglo-Christian literary tradition he inherited. Add that to the fact Jews (interestingly enough) because associated with two opposing forces writers fought over in his era, free capitalism and communism (I'm sensing a pattern here) and it's easy to see why Mr. Tradition himself uses them in the way he does.

And he was friends with Ezra Pound...though, unlike Pound, Eliot had a head on his shoulders and didn't decide to just go off spouting the most awful racist and fascistic shit while supporting Mussolini and writing speeches for the bastard.

He was never too virulent or openly hateful, never a "die Jews die" kind of guy...but it's safe to say he wasn't a fan either, at least of Jews as a stereotypical tradition.

Which honestly gives an invaluable lesson about Eliot's approach in and of itself--as much as I really admire his poetry and approach to literary tradition...as Eliot himself (inadvertently) showed with that damning passage in "Gerontion," tradition isn't everything, as as enriching as it can be in the hands of an Eliot, it can also limit your field of view.

Still my favorite poet and one of my favorite critics, but the man himself was flawed...and interestingly enough, I read in an article lately he was apparently perceived as a very nice guy in old age, so who knows, maybe he learned his lesson and grew from his prejudice...I'd like to hope he did.

Tl;dr

Hold up, isn't Shakespeare your favorite poet? Do you only consider him a playwright?

George Orwell no doubt.

Shakespeare is my favorite author of all-time.

Also my favorite playwright (of course.)

I love his poetry...but he's not my favorite poet.

That honor goes to Mr. Eliot there...

Shakespeare, Milton and Homer would be 2/3/4 in some order...

In terms of shorter poets, Lord Byron, all the way, the Original Rockstar, and 10x cooler than Johnny Keats (though I like Keats too.)

I know Emily Dickinson's on this list, and I like her as well..."Because I Could Not Wait for Death" is, in my opinion, one of the best poems ever written by an American author, male or female; that being said, that damn meter of hers can get a bit tired after a while (hell, even Shakespeare shook things up a bit sometimes.)

Walt Whitman's gone up and down in my mind...some days I think he's underrated, some days overrated...the same goes for Allen Ginsberg...but both are at the very least "good" poets and worthy of being read (and that's probably the nicest thing you'll hear me say about any Beat Poet ever, not a fan at all.)

Langston Hughes, both in his Harlem Renaissance Period and his "Red" Period, is astounding, and needs to be read MORE. Period.

Dante's...well, Dante.

Obviously Poe needs a mention, and you could argue "The Raven" is--excluding Eliot's poetry, as that's more Anglo-American and I'd argue he's more the former than the latter--maybe the most distinct and well-known American poem in the world, and with good reason, it's simply PERFECT. In the same way I think Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech is perfect, and that the opening paragraphs to "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" are perfect opening paragraphs, I'd say that "The Raven" is, for what it is, as perfect a poem as there is in the American canon. That being said, besides "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee," I tend to think of Poe more as a short story writer than a poet, though of course he was both...and many other things as well.

So, that's my TMI/tl;dr answer--

Shakespeare's my favorite playwright and favorite author OVERALL, but in terms of pure poetic prowess, I prefer Mr. Eliot, and I'd argue we STILL haven't had a poem that has topped "The Waste Land" (and yes, I include "Howl" in that...great poem, definitely my favorite work of the Beat Generation--though again, not a fan of that movement--but I'd argue TWL is still supreme, and has redefined poetry in such a way that we're still living in its colossal shadow today.)

Also:

Eliot: 4
Orwell: 4

Orwell

Mostly because of his pseudo-stache.

1. Any other reason, lol?

2. That 'stache is awesome