Krakatau might have even affected Munch!

For months [in 1883] Krakatau's aerosols spread around the globe, reflecting sunlight and creating lurid colours in the sky, just as Tambora had done. The moon appeared blue at times, as did the sun. Sunsets were a spectacular marbling of red, gold, orange and other hues. In New York and Connecticut, people called the fire department because they thought the red glow on the horizon was from a conflagration. The fantastically coloured cloud bands in Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream might have been inspired by Krakatau-tinted skies that the artist had seen in Norway. Even Alfred Tennyson took a stab at describing the spectacle in his poem 'St. Telemachus': 'Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peak/ Been hurl'd so high they ranged about the globe?'

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 3, p. 84

Downer of a Poem in the World Winter Following a Volcano

Not to be outdone [by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein], Lord Byron generated his own tale of gloom: the poem 'Darkness', which begins with these glum lines:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went — and came, and brought not day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation.

Byron goes on to depict ships rotting at sea, famine preying upon entrails, and dogs turning upon and eating their masters. Suffice it to say, 'Darkness' is a downer. But it accurately reflects the gloom that enveloped much of the world in 1816 — perhaps because of political unrest following the Napoleonic wars, but also in part because of the obscure volcano [Tambora] that had erupted in Indonesia.

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 3, p. 79, Kindle loc 906

Not until the early twentieth century did scientists finally link the year without a summer to Tambora.

Id., p. 80, loc 928

Romancing a poet

As for Mayakovsky, his infatuation had deepened when he discovered Tatiana's extraordinary knowledge of Russian poetry. Sitting with him at the various cafés they frequented—La Coupole, Le Voltaire, La Rotonde, Le Danton, La Closerie des Lilas—she recited poetry by the hour. How could he not have been seduced when he heard her speak out the whole of his own "The Cloud in Trousers," some seven hundred lines long? 

Francine du Plessix Gray, Them: A Memoir of Parents (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 56

Teacher learns from basketball

On some fundamental level, basketball is a game for which, love it as I may, I have no real aptitude. I move too slowly; the signals from my brain take too many detours on the way to my legs and arms. But it’s a good thing for someone who makes his living as a teacher to submit himself to a discipline that doesn’t come naturally. It builds a sort of kindliness and tolerance for students who come with varying abilities—some with seemingly no aptitude at all. Without the genial frustrations of basketball, I’d be more likely to think that stamping my foot might be the best way to get someone who seems utterly unable to understand a word of a poem by Wordsworth to find its flow. Well, I might suggest instead to this student that he can learn to read "Tintern Abbey" a little the way I learned to shoot a hook. Break it down into small, small elements; go one piece at a time; trace all the micromovements. "Long live what I badly did at Clemson": that’s James Dickey, thinking back to his "spindling explosions" as a running back in college. Well, long live what I do badly enough at basketball—humility, as the critic R. P. Blackmur liked to say, comes through submitting yourself to humiliation from time to time. 

Mark Edmundson, “Fadeaway Jumper,” American Scholar, v. 75, no. 1, Winter 2006, p. 61 at 65