So Lovecraft was raised by his mother, two aunts, and his grandfather, who all lived together. He wrote science fiction, fantasy, and horror, a genre that during his life was called “weird fiction.” He was an only child, and when he was three years old, his father had a nervous breakdown and spent five years in a hospital before he died he probably had a psychotic disease caused by syphilis. Lovecraft, born Howard Phillips Lovecraft in Providence, Rhode Island (1890). Her books of poetry include Dangers (1977), A World of Difference (1981), Hinge & Sign (1994), and Upgraded to Serious (2009). That seems useful to me, spiritually.” She went to Harvard when she was 16 and sold her first poem to The New Yorker a year later. If you live on the edge of an enormous mountain or an enormous body of water, it’s harder to think of yourself as being so important.

She said: “I have always lived on waterfronts. It’s the birthday of poet Heather McHugh, born in San Diego, California (1948). Before Churchill delivered a speech, he would practice over and over, sometimes in the bathtub. From there, he revised it several times and typed it up in what he called “psalm form.” His speeches looked like blank verse poetry on the page, so that the rhythm and pauses were laid out just how he wanted them. He brainstormed, researched, planned out the speech in his head, then dictated it aloud to his secretary. Winston, on the other hand, labored over every speech. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, served in the Parliament and was a talented debater, famous for making spontaneous speeches. But after the beginning of World War II, Churchill’s dramatic rhetoric fit the mood of the country. It was on this day in 1940 that Winston Churchill delivered a speech to the House of Commons with the famous line: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The Battle of Britain was raging, and he was referring to the small group of the Royal Air Force who had successfully held off the much larger Luftwaffe, the German air force.Ĭhurchill wrote all of his own speeches, and he was a gifted orator, but people thought that his vocabulary and style of speaking were old-fashioned. “ I Remember” by Anne Sexton from The Complete Poems.

Winston churchill high school