Archive for the Poetry and Literature Category (68 posts)

Primary Sources for Musical Learning: Celebrating the Public Domain and Engaging Creatively with Primary Sources

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By understanding a work’s original context, intent, message, and audience, creators can use cultural referents to frame new ideas. Public-domain classics achieve a continually evolving immortality as they are re-imagined by new generations of creative minds. Public domain works, through creative adaptation, can be used to create a commentary on the original work, engage contemporary issues, create opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue, and promote cultural change.

Celebrate Children’s Book Week with Us! Special Livestreamed Event 10am April 29th

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To kick off our celebration of Children’s Book Week (April 29-May 3), we invite you to tune into our live stream on Monday, April 29th, beginning at 10 am EDT.

We will be livestreaming a special program from the Young Readers Center in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Local authors who are members of the Children’s Book Guild of Washington, DC, will be reading twenty special children’s books from the Library’s collections.

The Evolution of Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”

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The Library of Congress houses the largest archival collection of Walt Whitman materials in the world, all of which have are now available online. Seeing portions of Whitman’s poems in various stages of composition reveals both his very active creative mind and his innovative ways of seeing the world and crafting poetic expressions.

Resources from the Library of Congress for Teaching English and Language Arts

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Staff from the Library of Congress will be in booth 151 at the annual convention of the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) in Houston on November 16-18, and we’d love to chat with you and give you a personalized tour of the Library’s primary source collections, teaching materials, and professional development resources.

Mark Twain: Exploring His Life and Work with Primary Sources

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Mark Twain’s reputation spans the centuries: He spent much of his lifetime as one of the most famous writers in the United States, and his works continue to appear in classrooms, as well as in debates over the curriculum. Even now, more than a century after his death, the discovery of an unpublished Twain tale has led to the publication of a new children’s book, which is the subject of an upcoming program at the Library of Congress.