Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints, “Ni...-”
for literature, language arts and social studies classrooms and home schoolers.

Lorine Niedecker
b. 5-12-1903; Fort Atkinson, WI
d. 12-31-1970

Lorine Niedecker is considered an Objectivist poet, one who treated the “poem as an object, emphasized sincerity, intelligence and ones ability to look clearly at the world”.

She made her living scrubbing hospital floors and proof reading.

Lorine Niedecker ~
• “The clothesline post is set
yet no totem-carvings distinguish the Niedecker tribe
from the rest; every seventh day they wash:
worship sun; fear rain, their neighbors' eyes;
raise their hands from ground to sky,
and hang or fall by the whiteness of their all.”

Friedrich Nietzsche
b. 10-15-1844; Germany
d. 8-25-1900

Philosopher and poet Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a short philosophical novel / poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in four parts between 1883 and 1885.

Friedrich Nietzsche quotes ~
• “When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: ‘Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!’” Zarathustra's Prologue, part 2
• “What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of your greatest contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome to you, and so also your reason and virtue. The hour when you say: “What good is my happiness? It is poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency. But my happiness should justify existence itself!’ The hour when you say: ‘What good is my reason? Does it long for knowledge as the lion for his prey? It is poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency!’ The hour when you say: ‘What good is my virtue? It has not yet driven me mad! How weary I am of my good and my evil! It is all poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency!’ The hour when you say: ‘What good is my justice? I do not see that I am filled with fire and burning coals. But the just are filled with fire and burning coals!’ The hour when you say: ‘What good is my pity? Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loves man? But my pity is no crucifixion!’” Zarathustra's Prologue, part 3
• “I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.”
• “I tell you: one must have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.”
• “I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.”
• “What does your conscience say? — ‘You shall become the person you are.’”
• “In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.”

Anaïs Nin
née Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell
b. 2-21-1903; France
d. 1-14-1977

Anaïs Nin is best remembered for her journals and erotica. The 1990 film Henry and June is based on her relationship with Henry Miller and his wife June. Anaïs Nin also studied psychotherapy with Otto Rank.

Anais Nin quotes ~
• “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
• “Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”
• “We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.”
• “If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.”
• “Dreams are necessary to life.”