A friend is a sweet song to our music! ❤️

On Famous Literary Friendships

Reflections | Friendship Day ❤️

#onhisbirthdaytoday [Tennyson]

The role of friends in our lives is indeed indescribable by all means!

Indeed, a good friendship enriches our lives in many sweet ways.

A good friend always encourages you to keep going, by their positivity, their sense of humour and their unconditional love for you!

True friends also give you a warm hug and a shoulder to cry on! Indeed they are quite important to our well-being.

In short, they have the charm and the power to transform you into a ‘better version’ of yourself.

On International Friendship Day today, this little post would like to foreground some of the famous literary friendships – and how such a friendship impacted each other’s lives mutually, for the better!

As eminent critic Scupin Richard rightly points out –

A friend is a sweet song to our music!

A lovely melody to our tunes!

A beautiful harmony to our verses!

First and foremost, the friendship of Apollinaire and Picasso.

Guillaume Apollinaire, who is credited with coining the terms, Orphic Cubism and Surrealism, got into the friendship of Pablo Picasso, which impacted their lives and their careers for the better. 

Well, Picasso is credited with pioneering Cubism, one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. Both of them - were instrumental in laying down the foundations of modernism in 20th century art and literature.

Secondly, the friendship of Boccaccio and Petrarch.

The Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio is best known for his The Decameron. His memorable friendship with Petrarch, proved invaluable in carving Boccaccio’s artistic development. 

Boccaccio was indeed a great fan and admirer of Petrarch. In 1351, Boccaccio went to Padua, along with a huge delegation, to help restore the citizenship of the poet, which he had lost because of the political upheaval during his day.  

Subsequently, when Boccaccio went through a period of spiritual crisis, it was his friend Petrarch who requested his dear friend not to sacrifice his literary calling, and not even think of burning the manuscript of The Decameron. The duo went on to lay down the foundations for the humanism of the Renaissance.

Thirdly, the friendship of Emerson with Carlyle.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s friendship with Carlyle was mostly via snail mail! It was Emerson who recommended Carlyle to a famous Boston publisher to publish the latter’s Sartor Resartus! Again, it was Emerson who introduced Henry David Thoreau to Carlyle and his works!

Fourthly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when he was schooled at Christ’s Hospital in London, got the friendship of Charles Lamb. 

Later on, when Coleridge went to Oxford, he got the friendship of Robert Southey. The two great poets then met to discuss and to develop a plan for a ‘‘pantisocracy,’’ – an egalitarian agricultural community.

Fifthly, Thomas Gray had a very memorable friendship with three other students: Thomas Ashton, Horace Walpole, and Richard West. 

They called themselves as the ‘‘Quadruple Alliance’’ and like the members of the Bloomsbury group, they very often met and discussed life and literature, impacting each other for the better.

Sixthly, Friedrich Nietzsche moved to Basel, where he got the friendship of the famed German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner’s influence on Nietzsche’s first book, titled, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was immense! 

Interestingly, Nietzsche had concluded the book advocating Wagner’s musical drama as a revival of Hellenic tragedy.

Seventhly, Rumi’s friendship with the Sufi mystic Shams al-Din Tabrizi had a profound mutual influence on the two of them. 

Rumi had hence dedicated most of his writings to this wandering Sufi. [Something akin to the friendship of Thomas More and Erasmus – a beautiful thirty-year long friendship, which saw each dedicating their works to the other].

Eighthly, Derek Walcott’s friendship with American poet Robert Lowell when they met for the first time, in Trinidad in 1962, is indeed a memorable, lasting one of sorts! 

When he moved over to the United States, Walcott got the friendship of two other literary giants - Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney! Quite interestingly, all three of them – Brodsky, Heaney and Walcott - were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and coincidentally, all three of them were published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 

Yet another similarity amongst the three of them was that, all three of them were outsiders in the United States: Brodsky was an exiled Russian, and Heaney an Irish expatriate.

Ninthly, today, coincidentally happens to be the birthday of the legendary Victorian poet - Alfred Lord Tennyson, who was known for his memorable friendship with Arthur Hallam.

When he joined Trinity College, Cambridge, Tennyson got the friendship of Arthur Hallam, son of the eminent historian Henry Hallam. 

This friendship was a turning point in Tennyson’s life, impacting him for the better. But the tragic death of Hallam was a great shock to Tennyson. He subsequently wrote an elegy for his close friend titled, In Memoriam, a vast poem comprising of 131 sections.

To conclude, then, with a lovely number from Petra,

Friends!!! love one another

Friends!! sisters and brothers

… Friends are a gift from above

Friends are devoted and true

Then when the goin' gets tough!

They're lovin',

Carin'

And prayin' for you!

Then when the goin' gets touuugh!

They're lovin',

Carin'!

And prayin' for you!

So here's wishing you all a very Happy and memorable Friendship Day dear readers!