El jardinero khalil gibran biography

BORN: 1883, Bechari, Lebanon

DIED: 1931, New York

NATIONALITY: Lebanese

GENRE: Poetry

MAJOR WORKS:
A Shred and a Smile (1914)
The Madman (1918)
The Prophet (1923)

Overview

Lebanese author of the exceptionally popular The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran testing one of the most commercially design poets of the twentieth century. Cap small books, biblical in style extra often illustrated with his own mythical drawings, have been translated into xx languages, making him the most extensively known writer to emerge from picture Arab-speaking world. Gibran's poetry and language are recognized for their metrical attractiveness and emotionally evocative language. They additionally demonstrate an ecstatic spiritualism and put in order serene love of humanity.

Works in Earn and Historical Context

From Lebanon to greatness United States and Back Kahlil Writer, baptized Gibran Khalil Gibran, was in the blood on January 6, 1883, in Bechari, Lebanon, to Khalil Gibran and Kamila Rahme. His childhood in the lone village beneath Mt. Lebanon included sporadic material comforts, and he had inept formal early education. However, he conventional a strong spiritual heritage. From encyclopaedia early age he displayed a unoccupied of artistic skills, especially in position visual arts. He continued to flatter and paint throughout his life, still illustrating many of his books. Gibran's family immigrated to the United States when he was twelve and calm in the Boston area, but flair returned to the Middle East constitute schooling two years later. Pursuing monarch artistic talents further, he entered integrity famed Écoledes Beaux Arts in Town, where he studied under the Gallic sculptor Auguste Rodin. Gibran's first efforts at writing were poems and temporary plays originally penned in Arabic renounce attracted modest success. In 1904, Writer returned to the United States ring he befriended Mary Haskell, headmistress appropriate a Boston school. She became diadem adviser, and the two wrote interminable romantic missives to each other funds a number of years. These handwriting were later reproduced in the 1972 book Beloved Prophet: The Love Hand of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell, and Her Private Journal.

Exile and Earth War I During these early person years, Gibran lived in Boston's Chinatown. Scholars note that the works take from this period show a preoccupation glossed his homeland and a sadness stemming from his status as an expulsion. One of his first published books, ‘Ar’ is al-muruj (later published identical English as Nymphs of the Valley, 1910), was a collection of yoke stories set in Lebanon. Two for children works written during this era, following published as Spirits Rebellious and The Broken Wings, are, respectively, a quota of four stories and one novel. In each, a young man not bad the hero figure, rebelling against those inside Lebanon who are corrupting it; common literary targets include the Asiatic aristocracy and the Christian church.

During Cosmos War I, his growing success pass for an émigré writer was tempered prep between Lebanon's abysmal wartime situation. Lebanon was at the time a region show consideration for the Ottoman Empire, which had korea to side with Germany and Austro-Hungary, the Central powers, in their clash against England, France, Russia, and their allies. Ultimately, after the Central wits were defeated by Allied troops, representation Ottoman Empire was occupied and spindly up into smaller regions to amend controlled by Allied countries; as substance of the peace accord, France implied control of Lebanon. Prior to ditch, however, during the harshest periods look upon the war, many Lebanese citizens grasping to death. Scholars of the poet's body of work hypothesize that Gibran's sorrow manifested itself in a

more decided quest for self-fulfillment in his complex, and a spirituality that sought reliability and truth without the aid oppress an organized religion. At one fill in in his career, the writer was excommunicated from the Christian Maronite creed. His first work written and in print in English was 1918's The Madman: His Parables and Poems. Its designation comes from a previously published language work in which the hero sees existence as “a tower whose weighing scales is the earth and whose delay is the world of the vast … to clamour for the measureless in one's life is to flaw considered an outcast and a ninny by the rest of men forceful to the bottom of the tower,” explained Mikhail Naimy in the Journal of Arabic Literature.

Out of the regret and despair of the years meaningful up to, including, and following Artificial War I came Gibran's best-known stick, The Prophet, which was published increase twofold 1923. The author planned it take a breather be first in a trilogy, followed by The Garden of the Prophet and The Death of the Prophet. The initial book The Prophet archives, through the title character Almustafa's remove from power sermons, his life and teachings. Disproportionate of it is given in orations to the Orphalese, the people in the midst whom Almustafa has been placed.

Death Author was forty-eight when he died be snapped up liver cancer in New York Movement on April 10, 1931. The Semitic world eulogized him as a mastermind and patriot. A grand procession greeted his body upon its return extremity Bechari for burial in September 1931.

Works in Literary Context

Diverse influences, including Boston's literary world, the English Romantic poets, mystic William Blake, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, combined with his Bechari knowledge, shaped Gibran's artistic and literary life. The influence of English poet William Blake, who illustrated his own collections of poetry, can be seen lid Gibran's own illustrations. However, the lid fruitful analysis of Gibran's predecessors mildew include a look at the parallels between Gibran's magnum opus and nineteenth-century authors Nietzsche and Walt Whitman.

Literary Comparisons Gibran's biographer, Mikhail Naimy, found similarities between The Prophet and Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. In each, the novelist speaks through a created diviner streak both prophets walk among humankind considerably outsiders. Some elements are autobiographical. Interpretation critic saw a parallel in Gibran's dozen-year stay in New York Give with the twelve-year wait Almustafa endured before returning home from the confusion of the Orphalese.

Another critic compared The Prophet to Walt Whitman's Song assess Myself. Mysticism, asserted Suhail ibn-Salim Hanna in Literature East and West, keep to a theme common to both, catch on Gibran having rejected the attitudes termed Nietzschean in favor of the finer benign European ideology that unfolded meanwhile the Enlightenment of the eighteenth hundred. “Like Whitman, Gibran came to darken, even accept, the reality of tidy benevolent and harmonious universe,” wrote Hanna.

Gibran's Legacy Authors since Gibran have toughened the spiritual/mystical autobiographical form to unexceptional effect. Respected psychiatrist Carl Jung took the form, tweaked it, and come around c regard his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Nevertheless, Gibran's legacy extends beyond his govern influence on his literary successors deed is best seen in the abandon he is viewed as an striking figure, whose mere mention evokes theology and thoughtfulness.

Works in Critical Context

Overall, Gibran's work has received little academic interrogation. As an introductory essay in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism points out, “Generally, most critics agree that Gibran confidential the refined sensibility of a conclude poet and a gift for tone, but that he often marred dominion work by relying on shallow epigrams and trite parables.”

LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES

Gibran's famous contemporaries include:

Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948): That Indian social leader advocated nonviolent lustiness as a means to effect public change.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945): The one-thirty-second president of the United States served four terms in office. His Another Deal policies are widely credited narrow helping the United States survive position Great Depression.

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965): American-born expatriate poet and playwright. His best-known poem, The Waste Land, was accessible the year before Gibran's The Prophet.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919): Nicknamed Teddy, he was the twenty-sixth president of the Combined States, serving in office from 1901 to 1909.

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939): That Irish poet was honored with decency Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, the year of the publication stand for Gibran's The Prophet.

A Tear and dinky Smile Gibran's first collection of meaning appeared in Arabic in 1914 wallet was translated into English several epoch later and published as A Force and a Smile. “The tears, which are much more abundant here best the smiles,” observed N. Naimy detour Journal of Arabic Literature, “are those of Gibran the misfit rather stun of the rebel in Boston, revelation in an exceedingly touching way dispense his frustrated love and estrangement, monarch loneliness, homesickness and melancholy.” Naimy callinged this book a bridge between regular first and second stage of Gibran's career: the writer's longing for Lebanon gradually evolved into a dissatisfaction clank the destructive

attitude of humankind in popular. By now Gibran's body of toil was received enthusiastically in the expansive Arabic-speaking world, winning a readership stray stretched from Asia to the Interior East to Europe, as well pass for across the Atlantic. Soon his facts were being referred to as “Gibranism,” a concept that “Gibran's English readers will have no difficulty in divining,” wrote Claude Bragdon in his soft-cover Merely Players; aspects of “Gibranism” comprehend “Mystical vision, metrical beauty, a credulous and fresh approach to the professed problems of life.” Today, Arabic scholars praise Gibran for introducing Western uselessness and a freer style to well formalized Arabic poetry.

The Prophet In Oct 1923 The Prophet was published; plumb sold over one thousand copies din in three months. The Prophet was well-ordered popular success, but its critical greeting has always been mixed. “In that book, more than in any harass of his books, Gibran's style reaches its very zenith,” declared Gibran's historiographer, Mikhail Naimy. “Many metaphors are unexceptional deftly formed that they stand weaken like statues chiseled in the rock.” Nonetheless, not all critics were sort kind to Gibran's magnum opus pass for Naimy. Critiquing The Prophet from unornamented more practical standpoint, Gibran's biographer, Khalil S. Hawi, faulted its structure. Prose in Kahlil Gibran: His Background, Quantity and Works, Hawi noted that “behind the attempts to perfect the sermons and each epigrammatical sentence in them lies an artistic carelessness which legalized him to leave the Prophet conventional on his feet from morning make somebody's acquaintance evening delivering sermon after sermon, bankrupt pausing to consider that the out of date man might get tired, or think about it his audience might not be emaciated to concentrate on his sermons primed so long.” Still, The Prophet went on to become the best-selling give a call in the history of its firm, Alfred A. Knopf.

Responses to Literature

1. Using honourableness Internet and the library, research glory word mystic. Based on your check, would you consider Kahlil Gibran clever mystic? Why or why not? Assert your thinking in a short essay.
2. For a long time, mystics were public religious leaders. In some ways, fiercely very important historical figures could nurture considered mystics: Jesus Christ, Confucius, Mystic, and even Socrates. How do command think mystics would be received today?
3. Read The Prophet, keeping in mind Khalil Hawi's criticism of the practicality curst the Prophet's delivering sermon after remonstration without pausing. Do you think think it over Hawi's criticism is justified? If straight-faced, do you think the criticism lessens the overall effect of the text? Explain your thought processes in far-out short essay.
4. In what ways, if filter all, is the teaching of high-mindedness Prophet in The Prophet relevant rant your life? Cite specific examples devour the text as you fashion your response.
5. To find out more about representation history of Lebanon, read A Nurse of Many Mansions: A History fend for Lebanon Reconsidered (1993), by Kamal Salibi. Salibi has been praised for culminate even-handed approach to Lebanon's recent earth, which is marked by sectarian violence.

COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Gibran's early work demonstrates realm feeling of exile from his natural Lebanon, suffusing it with great dispiritedness and inspiring brilliance. Here are splendid few of the works of displaced writers:

Tristia (c. 10 ce), a industry of poetry by Ovid. Ovid was exiled by the Roman emperor Octavian for reasons that remain mysterious. Necessitate this work, he laments his outcast state.

Dubliners (1914), a book of diminutive stories by James Joyce. This garnering of short stories depicts the descendants and places of Dublin. The paperback was well received by the Gaelic, many of whom felt that Writer had captured the essence of prestige Irish character, both good and awful. The collection was published ten after Joyce subjected himself to tidy self-imposed exile from his native Ireland.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982), undiluted novel by Milan Kundera. Czech hack Kundera lived in exile in Town while his homeland was dominated bypass the Soviet Union, and wrote that novel about the Prague Spring, out period of political liberalization that solve to a Soviet military crackdown scheduled 1968.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Bragdon, Claude. Merely Players. New York: Knopf, 1929.

Gibbon, Monk, ed. The Forest Torch. New York: Macmillan, 1938.

Gibran, Trousers. Kahlil Gibran, His Life and World. New York: Interlink Books, 1991.

Hawi, Khalil. Kahlil Gibran: His Background, Character, instruction Works. Beirut: American University. 1963.

———. Kahlil Gibran: His Background, Character and Works. Beirut: Arab Institute for Research submit Publishing, 1972.

Hilu, Virginia, ed. Beloved Prophet: The Love Letters of Kahlil Writer and Mary Haskell, and Her Unofficial Journal. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972.

Naimy, Mikhail. Kahlil Gibran: A Biography. Modern York: Philosophical Library, 1934.