Authors Posters & Prints, “Gil...-Gis...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, home schoolers and scholars.

Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman, Historic Print

Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
b. 7-3-1860; Hartford, CT
d. 8-17-1935 (breast cancer & suicide)

Sociologist and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform who is best remembered today for her semi-autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. Her aunts included Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman quotes ~
• “It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is narrowed by the woman.”
• “It is the duty of youth to bring fresh new powers to bear on Social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should life the world forward. That is what they are for.”
• “To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”
• “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.”
• “The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society – more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”
• “Love grows by service.”
• “And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.”
• “To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful things has more.”
• “Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! . . . Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.”

Allen Ginsberg
b. 6-3-1926; Newark, New Jersey
d. 4-5-1997; NYC

Poet Allen Ginsberg was one of the leaders of the 1950s Beat Generation.

His best known work “Howl”, against conformity and capitalism, gained notority in an obscenity trial: the judge ruled that the poem had “redeeming social importance” and was not obscene.

Ginsburg was also a Buddhist, choosing to purchase second hand clothing and living as frugally as possible, and spoke out against the war in Vietnam.

Allen Ginsberg quotes ~
• “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”
• “The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.”
• “Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.”
• “I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... And think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries... Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences ...”
• “Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
• “It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.”
• “The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.”

• Allen Ginsberg CD Poetry Collection : Booklet and CD
• East Village Culture Map

The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni (no commercially available poster)

“Nikki” Giovanni
née Yolande Cornelia
b. 6-7-1943; Knoxville, TN

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni has taught English at Virginia Tech since 1987. In 2004 Giovanni was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

Nikki Giovanni quotes ~
• “We love because it's the only true adventure.”
• “There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your live those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.”
• “Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.”
• “I am so hip even my errors are correct.”
• “Nothing is easy to the unwilling.”
• “A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked, don't want to go without guarantee. But that's what's got to happen. You go naked until you die.”
• “I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility.”
• “I really don't think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don't mind the failure but I can't imagine that I'd forgive myself if I didn't try.”
• “If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.”
• “If I can't do what I want to do, then my job is to not do what I want to do. It's not the same thing, but it's the best thing I can do.”
• “If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.”
• “Deal with yourself as a individual, worthy of respect and make everyone else deal with you the same way.”
• “We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.”
• “It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people.”

New Grub Street, George Gissing (no commercially available poster)

George Gissing
b. 11-22-1857; England
d. 12-28-1903; France

George Gissing's most highly regarded novel, New Grub Street (1891), is about men and women forced to make their living by writing.

George Gissing quotes ~
• “Have the courage of your desire.”
• “It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.”
• “Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.”
• “That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.”
• “It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.”
• “Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice.”