Kevin Sun

Charles Ives, ca. 1913 (Wikimedia Commons) Last semester, I had the pleasure of taking a semester-long survey of the life and works of Charles Ives with  John Heiss , a New England Conservatory elder statesman with an encyclopedic knowledge of Ives's music. My term paper was an 1800-word late-night ramble on Ives's idiosyncratic writing style in "Essays Before a Sonata," particularly regarding his penchant for aphorism, epigram, and apothegm. I thought I'd share it here. * * * * * Charles Ives and Aphorism “Read where you will, each sentence seems not to point to the next but to the undercurrent of all”  — Charles Ives,  Essays Before a Sonata  (xvii)             Charles Ives was a master aphorist. A skill that was possessed by a select few in the history of letters, aphorizing is a combination of wit, insight, and poetic disposition. This tendency toward aphorism and prove...

Plenty of interesting factoids gleaned during the first few days of classes, e.g. , that Emily Dickinson's poems are numbered according to Dickinson scholars' estimated chronological order, which is based primarily on the variation in her handwriting. Other scholars have apparently put a wrench in this approach by suggesting ways in which the movement of the sun might have changed the lighting of the room in which Dickinson was writing, causing her to write slightly slanted this way or that at different times of day. Of course, the well known fact about Dickinson is her status as the ultimate literary recluse, which might not necessarily have been entirely a result of her own choosing: she wrote over 1000 poems in her lifetime, but was unable to publish even a dozen of them. Literary magazines and other publications often deemed her poems unpublishable, and the ones that were published were homogenized by editors to reflect contemporary cultural norms.  Starting the seme...