Huck Gutman

You have arrived at Huck Gutman's home page. Please look around.  And make sure to check out some of the linksprovided below, many of which are to other web pages of mine.

A Professor of English at the University of Vermont, I am also the former Chair of the English Department.  I teach courses in poetry -- Nineteenth Century American Poetry, Modern American Poetry, Contemporary American Poetry, Poetry in Translation -- and also specialized courses, also in poetry, such as "Romanticism and the Self: Wordsworth and Whitman," and "The Poetry of Witness."  My most recent course, to be offered for the first time in Fall 2002 is "Poetic Revolutions and the Modern World."

In recent years, I have lectured widely on American poetry and also on American politics.  I have spent several weeks lecturing in each of the following countries:
            Egypt
            India
            Lithuania
            Portugal
            Tunisia
I have also taught for extended periods as Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Universidad Nova and the Universidad Classica, both in Lisbon, Portugal, and at Calcutta University in Kolkata, India.

My most recent book is entitled Outsider in the House, a political memoir which I co-authored with Rep. Bernie Sanders, the Member of Congress from Vermont and the only Independent in the U. S. House of Representatives.  I am also the author of three other books: Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (edited with my friends Luther Martin and Patrick Hutton), and As Others Read Us: International Perspectives on American Literature.  Outsider and Technologies are both available from Amazon.comwhile the others are available from Powell's Books .

I also work as Senior Aide to Representative Bernard Sanders, Vermont's member of the United States House of Representatives.  Representative Sanders is the longest serving independent in the U.S. Congress in  our nation's history.  His web page is at  Rep. Bernie Sanders .
 
 

Web Pages

Modern Poetry
To explore poems of our century by Anna Akhmatova, Elizabeth Bishop, Yehuda Amichai, Charles Baudelaire, Constantin P. Cafavy,  T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Zbigniew Herbert, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Rainier Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens you should visit my Modern Poetry page by clicking on:  Modern Poetry or on Modern Poetry (alternate site).

Political Analysis:
To visit essays written on American politics and culture and other essays on international affairs, all published in The Statesman, the English language newspaper of Kolkata (Clacutta) India, click here: Statesman Essays

Reading Poetry: An Introduction
To visit a page which explores why we should read poems -- and how easy it can be to read a poem -- check out this new website, Reading Poems: How to get started

Indian Music
There is even a web page, recently created, on Rabindra Sangeet, which are the poems of Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore with musical settings by Tagore.  This site includes a Real Audio streaming audio performance by Swapan Gupta, of Kolkata (Calcutta), India.  Try them -- you will like them!
Rabindra Sangeet

Student web page
A web page created by my students on Twentieth Century History: Important Struggles and Forces, with links, can be found at 20th Century Page.

Robert Browning Pages
I would never have guessed, six months ago, that I would have pages on Robert Browning, but here are two poems I greatly admire, and since one is unavailable on the internet, and the other extremely hard to find, I have decided to make them more widely available -- with some brief, easy commentary:
"House"
"Dis Alter Visum; or, Le Byron de Nos Jours"

Families: A Journal
Through my interest in and connections to the University of Calcutta, I have begun a web page to expand the audience for Families: A Journal of Representations.

Matisse Paintings -- a Slide Show
This is a slide show of early to middle paintings by Henri Matisse.  It was created for my Poetry and the Arts course.  When you go to the page, click on each 'slide' listed on the left in order, and you will see a thorough survey of Matisse's paintings through about 1918.  (If you are not a student you can, of course, just click on any of the paintings you are interested in viewing.)

Pre-Raphaelite Painting
This is a slide show created for poetry classes studying William Butler Yeats.  Yeats' father John was a painter; his contemporaries were the pre-Raphaelites, and in many ways Yeats' early poetry -- in the late 1880's and the 1890's -- looks backward to the visual art of his father's generation, paintings of the 1860's and 1870's.  The dreamy, symboilic, idealized world Yeats invents in his so-called "Celtic Twilight' period is deeply indebted to Pre-Raphaelite pictorial practice.The slide show goes on with 'symbolist' painting after the Pre-Rahaelites, into Beardsley and ultimately Gustav Klimt (1862-1918).

•  When you go to the page, click on each 'slide' listed on the left in order, and you will see a thorough survey of Matisse's paintings through about 1918.  (If you are not a student you can, of course, just click on any of the paintings you are interested in viewing.)

Vermont Flowers
Images of Vermont flowers, by season.

WHAT YOU MIGHT READ

Visit a site where you can find a list of books you might want to read, with a few movies sprinkled in, and some musical and artistic suggestions as well!  Just double-click on this picture of the UVM campus and Lake Champlain in the background.

 

This photo is of Billings, the architectural gem of the University of Vermont campus.  It was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson.  If you click on the image, you will be taken to Common Dreams, one of my favorite web pages -- a web center for politically interesting news and views.

 

 The center of UVM, the Green.  Clicking on this image will take you to the UVM English Department home page.
 
 

 UVM has a fine ski team, though no one ever watches them ski, me included.  But if you click on this image, you will go to the University of Vermont home  page.
 
 

Every day on my computer this painting,"The Rue Mosnier Decorated with Flags" [1878 ] by Edouard Manet, appears on my screen.  I never fail to be amazed at it.  Celebratory (all those patriotic flags), a scene of everyday life (there is that ladder being carried down the street, right out of the picture), sun and shade, carriages, women in fine summer gowns, men richly dressed,  Through it, on the side yet remarkably at the center of our vision since the actual center of the painting is an empty patch of sunshine so bright even the cobblestones disappear, is a man on crutches -- likely crippled by a war that the patriotic flags once urged upon the populace, likely of a very different economic standing than the stylishly-dressed people on the other side of the street; a man whose blue smock identifies him as being of the same working class as whoever is carrying that ladder....