Articles About Sthephan G. Stephansson
Title: CANADAS LEADIND POET - STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON (1853-1927)
Author: Watson Kirkconell
CANADA is lacking in those literary shrines which an older civilization scatters so lavishly across its countryside. Ayr, Ecclefechan and Abbotsford, Grasmere, Stratford, Stoke Poges, and unnumbered other Old-World villages and towns, are honoured for their ghosts of literary association, an intangible accumulation of the fruitful centuries. When, in an era yet to come, a similar place-worship arises in Canada, a strong claim to recognition will be made by the little Albertan hamlet of Markerville, near which, for almost forty years; lived Stephan G. Stephansson, one of the greatest of all Icelandic poets, and, as an adopted Canadian, an author with an eminent place in our own literary annals.
Title: THE GREATEST POET OF THE WESTERN WORLD: STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON
Author: F. Stanton Cawley
A short time ago I delivered a lecture in Phillips Brooks House in Cambridge before the American-Scandinavian Forum on "The Greatest American Poet: Stephan G. Stephansson." Dr. Rognvaldur Petursson was kind enough to suggest that I print this lecture in Timarit, but I was obliged to decline his invitation because I felt that my presentation of the subject, intended for an audience most of the members of which knew literally nothing of the man, would be quite unsuitable for a circle of readers who have the most compelling motives of racial pride and national consciousness to know as much as possible about him.
Title: STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON (1853-1927)
Author: Prof. Skuli Johnson
There is nothing in the antecedents or in the circumstances of Stephan G. Stephansson to account for him. Of humble peasant origin, he was reared on a little farm-annex in northern Iceland, which was so poor that it long ago went back into wasteland. He had no formal education; his only reading was in borrowed sagas and in the family Bible. For sixteen years he laboured as a pioneer in Wisconsin and North Dakota and was little known. It was when he migrated to Canada to become a pioneer in Alberta that his poetic powers really matured. The prairie-land, the foothills and the Rockies made him a poet of national significance.
Title: STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON
Author: H. Milnes
OCTOBER THE THIRD this year was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the poet, Stephan G. Stephansson. He lived most of his life in Canada, yet few Canadians outside of our Icelandic community have ever heard of him. Icelanders, here and in Iceland, consider him one of the greatest men they have ever produced, and in the West he is affectionately referred to as "Stephan G."— his name has become a household word.
Title: STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON
Author: Richard Beck
To have earned the lasting gratitude of both his native Iceland and his adopted country, Canada, is the unusual distinction of the poet Stephan G. Stephansson, whose centenary was commemorated in 1953 by his countrymen and other admirers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Title: WHERE THE LIMITATION OF LANGUAGE AND GEOGRAPHY CEASE TO EXIST
Author: Haraldur Bessason
The works of the Icelandic Canadian poet, Stephan G. Stephansson rank high in quality not only when compared with other literature in Icelandic, but also as a part of world literature concerned with human progress and betterment.
Title: STEPHANSSON - ICELAND'S POET LAUREATE IN CANADA
Author: David May
Despite a small population, harsh climate and relative obscurity among the nations of the world, Iceland is a fiercely literate country. One of Icelanders' literary shrines is the home — now being restored as an Alberta historic site — of Stephan G. Stephansson, described as the greatest Scandinavian poet since the Middle Ages. For more than 40 years he lived, farmed and wrote in Markerville, just north of Innisfail.
Title: OUR ICELANDIC HERO-POET
Author: John Sheppard
Icelanders hold two things dear: poets and heroes. The heroes are the Vikings whose descendants the Icelanders are. The poets are the ancient balladeers who keep the memory of those fierce warriors alive, and the moderns who keep their ancient language fresh. Odd it is then that one of Iceland's most revered poets was a pacifist farmer who wrote his works in far-off Alberta and died here in relative obscurity.
Title: REDISCOVERING CANADIAN DIFERENCE
Author: Vidar Hreinsson
Stephan G. Stephansson (1853-1927) is considered foremost among the immigrant poets who wrote in Icelandic in North America. Stephansson settled in Markerville in Alberta, having initially emigrated to the US. His poetry reveals the intellectual potentials of Icelandic literary culture. But as Mikhail M. Bakhtin notes, "A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures".
Title: THE BARNYARD POET: STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON (1853-1927)
Author: Vidar Hreinsson
One rainy, stormful day in fall in the late 1860s, a poor boy in Skagafjordur, Northern Iceland, watched three boys riding by. They were on their way to the Latin School in Reykjavik. Overwhelmed with pain, realizing that he would never be able to attend school, he threw himself on the ground, sobbing. This story has often been told to school boys, to evoke their guilt for not bothering to do their lessons.
Title: STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON (3 OCTOBER 1853 - 10 AUGUST 1927)
Author: Vidar Hreinsson
Stephan G. Stephansson is among the paradoxes of Icelandic literary history. He was a hardworking immigrant and farmer all his life, but his literary, mainly poetic, output was prolific-more than 2,000 pages of poetry and 1,500 pages of prose (preserved letters, fiction, articles, and essays). The sheer amount of writing is, however, not unique among literary Icelandic farmers.
Title: THE POET IN THE PIGPEN: STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON
Author: Vidar Hreinsson
An outstanding feature of Icelandic culture over the centuries is the high degree of literacy and literary activities among common people. Unschooled farmers and peasants have long engaged in copying manuscripts as well as in composing poetry and prose. The printing press was monopolised by the church until 1773 and there were no cultural or educational institutions outside the church. The printed, 'official' literature was thus religious, but a spontaneous, 'unofficial' literary institution also existed in the form of all kinds of manuscripts. The literary culture among common people was a strange forum of poetry, stories and ideas.
Title: THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN POET: STEPHAN GUDMUNDSSON STEPHANSSON
Author: Kerry Wood
Stephan G. Stephansson was born on October 3, 1853, on a small farm named Kirkjuholl, in the parish of Skagafjorour, in the community of Akoreirie on the north coast of Iceland. The land has now been abandoned in Iceland. The poet lived there until he was twenty years old, when he took passage to America and hired out as a day laborer to a farmer near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The payment for his work was small, but he was frugal by nature and managed to save some of his earnings. A year later he moved to Shawano County in the same state, and it was there that he married Helga Jonson.
Title: STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON: A PHILOSOPHICAL POET, A POETIC PHILOSOPHER
Author: Kristjan Kristjansson
The aim of the paper is to present a sweeping, if somewhat personal, overview of some recurring themes in Stephansson's philosophy of life: his anti-determinism and emphasis on individual human responsibility, his atheism, his unflattering view of human evil, his ideal of all-round maturity, and his refined, prudential hedonism. The topicality of Stephansson's concerns, which tally neatly with the recent upsurge of naturalism and virtue-based ethics, may serve as an indication of the essential feasibility, if yet incompleteness, of the Enlightenment project of constructing a unified morality in a world where, as in Stephansson's poetry, "the limitations of language and geography cease to exist."
Title: SKAGAFJORDUR, AND A STEP BEYOND
Author: Haraldur Bessason
The present article attempts to show how, in one of his major poems, the first part of which recounts the geological history of his native district in Iceland, Stephan G. Stephansson draws on Norse or Icelandic mythology to give his theme a universal scope and reveal a parallel between the creative work of divine forces and the art of poetry. In a broad sense, the theme of the poem encompasses man's struggle with his environment, reflecting at the same time that, in combination, the resistance to" inimical forces and a forward move against obstacles generate a creative force or power.
Title: METAPHORS OF CARE AND GROWTH: THE POETIC LANGUAGE OF STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON
Author: Vidar Hreinsson
Stephan G. Stephansson was a self-educated farmer, brought up amidst the strong literary traditions that formed a central part of the Icelandic culture of the countryside. This background gave Stephan the skill that enabled him to capture the experiences of the New World in words and images. The present paper examines the relationship between nature, culture and labour in Stephan's imagery. The analysis is inspired by Ricouer's ideas of metaphors being deviating extensions of meaning rather than simple substitutions.
Title: OUT IN THE OPEN AIR - THE LEGACY OF STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON
Author: Stefan M. Jonasson
The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson idealized the poet as the representative human being, in whom the powers of both divinity and nature came into focus. "The poet is the person," he wrote, "in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and impart." Few societies have better understood Emerson's sentiment than that of the Icelanders, who have celebrated their poets throughout the generations.
Title: DEDICATION OF THE STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON HOMESTED SITE IN NORTH DAKOTA
Author: John Johnson
Welcome to the homestead site of Stephan G. Stephansson, the acclaimed Icelandic poet. Stephan lived here from 1880 to 1889 in what was then known as Dakota Territory. Today we are here to dedicate this stone marker in memory of Stephan in the 150th year of his birth.
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