Before Black Lives matter, there was "The Present Crisis" by James Russell Lowell

Описание: This is the old version – the poem only.,

The new version – better, and with essay inspired by the poem – is here:

   • The Easy Way to  be on the Right Side of H...  

There comes a time for every nation to decide – will it stand on the side of right or wrong? It’s a question we have to ask today just as we had to 150 years ago.

„The Present Crisis“ by James Russell Lowell.

Watch the entire series “101 Famous Poems” at Vimeo.com/HulaInk.

One reason I love this classic American collection of poems is that it’s old-fashioned-ness: all our modern self-fascination and trendy irony is gone and in it’s place is good old inspiration and love of duty and purpose. I think a lot of us are so caught up in the concern of our time that we lose sight of the values our world were built on – it’s healthy for all of us to recall them to mind once in a while.

Thus the 101 Famous Poem Project – producing every poem in the collection as a stand-alone videobook on Vimeo.

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About the poet:

James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891) was an influential American Romantic poet, editor and diplomat.
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lowell earned a law degree at Harvard, where he had a reputation as a troublemaker. He published his first collection of poems in 1841 and became famous for a satirical books of poems criticizing critics, and his most successful collection was The Bigelow Papers.
He was married twice – a second time following the death of his first wife – and was over the course of his life a professor of languages at Harvard, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, ambassador to Spain and to the Court of St. James, and spent his final years in the home where he was born.
Lowell was a political poet and his theme was anti-slavery. He wrote The Present Crisis in protest of the foreseeable annexation of Texas, because it would have given more power to the South and thus cement slavery, and it quickly became the anthem of abolition.
The poem still resonates today: The NAACP named their newspaper, the Crisis, after it; the hymn Once to Ever man and Nation was composed using the poem as lyrics, and it was quoted in the opening prayer to the second impeachment of President Donald Trump.
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Who is Grumpy Old Writer?

E. T. Hansen is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction, in German and English, and lives in Berlin.

He writes fiction and non-fiction in English and German (Neuntöter, Blutbuche, Wassertöcher, Losing My Religion, The Cat Tales, Do Cats Have Souls?, The Art of Worldly Wisdom and more).

Many of his books and stories are published as complete videobooks on Vimeo.com/HulaInk.

You can support E.T. Hansen by:

– subscribing to Vimeo.com/HulaInk and sharing his videos;
– buying him a virtual whisky on PayPal.Me/HulaInk, or
– becoming a patron at Patreon.com/ETHansen.

But mostly I hope you enjoy and get something out of my work – Thanks for your support and I wish you all the love, luck and happiness in the world.

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Poets in this series include: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Tennyson, Percy Byssche Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Wadsworth, John Milton and more.

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The music used in this video is „Memorial“, which is provided for without copyright restriction by Apple as part of the software package Final Cut Pro X.

The photo of the poet and the text from which his or her biographical notes were adapted are taken from Wikipedia.