Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), poet, was born on 13 June 1865 at 1 George's Ville, 5 Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, the eldest child of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) and Susan Mary, née Pollexfen (1841–1900). His father was then still a barrister; shortly he would—to the discomfiture of his wife, and still more of her family—give up the law for the uncertain life of a portrait painter in bohemian London.

Background and youth

In Robert Frost’s grim little poem. “The Vanishing Red,” the mere presence of “the last Red Man” in a Maine town so angers a miller that he murders the Indian.

“The Vanishing Red,” a brutal and callous tale that is probably Frost’s most controversial poem.

The images in the poem "The Vanishing Red" by poet Robert Frost stay with a reader for many years. The narrative of a murder and the starling imagery of the mill all play into the tenacity of this poem and lend to it's lasting quality as a piece of substantial literature of the twentieth century. This is at odds with the explicated narrative of the poem, which instead describes a forgetful nation that makes its way on the broken backs and death of a people it is quick to forget.

The final blood of the Indians in Frost's poem "The Vanishing Red," dyes a millstream red after the last Indian in Acton, a town near Boston, has been thrown down among the grinding stone millwheels, "He is said to have been the last Red Man / In Acton," "Poking about in the mill," John, the last Indian, makes a "guttural," a savage, sound the miller finds disgusting, perhaps an insult to his mill machinery, A narrator describes John's end:

He took him down below a cramping rafter.

And showed him, through a manhole in the floor.

If the nationalistic celebration Frost provided President Kennedy in “The Gift Outright” still sets your teeth on edge, leaven that irritation with Frost’s lacerating attack on the American cult of fame and money in his poem “Provide, Provide” from A Further Range . . . .

Ai's "The Testimony of J.

A "testimony" suggests evidence provided by an expert witness to a governmental or judicial hearing.  On the other hand, at the opposite end of the spectrum, it also could be indicative of a more personal account of an ecstatic or religious experience.  In either case, a testimony is fundamentally a truth claim of sorts, whether it appeals to evidence deemed objective, subjective or some combination thereof (and this poem's account certainly runs the gamut between such a polarities).

The question of respect for one's own needs despite an apparent selfishness is raised in "Two Tramps in Mud Time." Because the speaker has had no previous relationship with the tramps—they are "two strangers"—the question can remain the abstract one of what one owes to one's fellow man, what one must give of one's self to the claims of another if the claims conflict, even if there is no obligation to that person, no claim by right of anything except common humanity, human kindness, or guilt in the face of another person's need.

Like many of Frost's poems, "Two, Tramps in Mud Time" unites divergent lines of thought by placing in tension opposed or contradictory values: the self and the other, the literal and the symbolic, the general and the particular, the straight-forward and the ironic, and so on. It is generally agreed that, at the end of the poem, Frost leaves it to his readers to apply to their own lives, to their "avocations and vocations," the maxim that love and need, work and play, can and should be one. But less agreement exists as to the message and quality of this "editorializing."

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