Ode

Maya Angelou overcame a difficult and traumatic childhood to become a prize-winning poet and the author of several best-selling autobiographies, including her celebrated first volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). She was also the first African American, and the first woman, invited to read a poem at the inauguration of a president of the United States. Born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, Maya was three when her parents were divorced. She and her…

My love of Joan Didion is lifelong and, like anyone does with heroes, always feels at such a distance. In fact, Didion was much closer to me than I could have imagined. For the last years of her life, I became a friend of Susan Sontag?s. I had known that Sontag was ?important? before I met her in 1989, but I had never read anything by her but her famous ?Notes on Camp,? which I confess bewildered me when I first read it as a teenager. After meeting her, I read ?On Photography? and realized…

1 Bill Denbrough thinks: I'm damned near space-travelling; I might as well be inside a bullet shot from a gun. This thought, although perfectly true, is not one he finds especially comfortable. In fact, for the first hour following the Concorde's takeoff (or perhaps liftoff would be a better way to put it) from Heathrow, he has been coping with a mild case of claustrophobia. The airplane is narrow-unsettlingly so. The meal is just short of exquisite, but the flight attendants who serve it must…

After being in military school for my whole high school career, I decided I would like to continue the trend into college. I feel as though the structure provided by military schools is unmatched when compared to other schools. For college I believe that the military school environment would help me out the most. My next thing to figure out is what major do I wish to pursue? I really don’t know about majors and jobs that would be fun to have. The only thing I know is I would like a fun and…

Arnold Schoenberg, a Viennese composer born on September 13th, 1874, would become one of the most important influences on classical contemporary music. Born to a non musical family, Schoenberg was a primarily self-taught cellist and joined an amateur orchestra under the direction of Alexander Zemlinsky. He would later be instructed in composition by Zemlinsky, and in counterpoint by Oskar Adler. Schoenberg became prolific in music theory and composition while working his job as a bank clerk, and…

Like many of us, Ginsberg did not quite know what he wanted to do or be when he graduated from high school. After graduating from the Paterson Eastside High School in 1943 his father wanted him to be a labor lawyer. “Ginsberg quickly dropped this aspiration and settled into his niche in the university's English Department. Professor Lionel Trilling became his mentor, encouraging Ginsberg to write poetry” (Beat Bios). He went on to Columbia University, it was there that he would meet, Lucien…

of great wealth. Furthermore, scenes of the novel were inspired by the Fitzgerald’s trip with the Murphys as well as real war grounds such as the hill of Thiepval. Less obvious, the title of novel, Tender is the Night, was inspired by John Keat’s “Ode to a…

It’s the holiday season. A time full of joy, music, post-cookie guilt, and uncomfortable family gatherings. In 2016, the strategy to simply avoid all political talk at the dinner table was effective. But increasingly over the last 10 years, it’s been impossible to ignore the impact of United States President Donald Trump. This week, we’re opening a time capsule here at The Source Magazine—an examination of Donald Trump’s rise to one of the most coveted positions in global politics. In 2015, when…

The intricacy of the character of Antigone is well developed through the course of the play by Sophocles. Being a lead role in the play, Sophocles evidently intended for her character to be perhaps one of the most difficult to understand. Antigone plays a more masculine role, the laws of the city are being defied by her and no one seems to acknowledge the laws of the gods, which she feels, should be acknowledged more. Her temperament is the same in terms of her rebelliousness against Creon…

The Divine Sacrifice Although it is believed that ancient Greeks did not practice human sacrifice, the concept itself occupied a large space of Greek drama, which raises questions about its meaning(s), function(s), and how it has contributed to the human-deity relationship in Greek Drama. Human sacrifice, as a thematic frame, is common within the works of the three Greek tragedians, who employ it as a mean to create a dilemma in their plays, add a layer of meaningful depth to the human death…