Word: ageing
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...college! More college today!’” says Novey, who worked on a congressional campaign during his gap year and then became a congressional staffer when his candidate won the election. “You could go weeks without seeing a girl your age in D.C. It teaches you to appreciate that you have a built-in social scene...
Every poetic career follows a different trajectory. Yeats’ style evolved and improved throughout his long career; Wordsworth composed his greatest works in his youth, but continued writing through his old age. The deterioration of poetic talent must be one of the greatest fears of an aging poet. Although Derek Walcott—who turned eighty this past January—is a Nobel Laureate and the author of over twenty published volumes of poetry, the dread of losing his poetic ability permeates “White Egrets,” his newest collection. He writes...
...sequence of poems that range in subject from Walcott’s travels in Italy and Spain to his former love affairs. As he explores a wide array of memories and places, the poet attempts to come to terms with his recollections of the past and the effects of age upon his body and mind...
...times, Walcott’s obsession with the effects of age runs the risk of becoming too personal, or even self-indulgent. Details of his physical ailments and his fear of waning virility can detract from his deeper meditations on his hopes, his regrets, and his poetry. At one point, he describes “a furious itch that raises welts” over his body; elsewhere he writes, “My lust is in great health, but, if it happens / that all my towers shrivel to dribbling sand, / joy will still bend the cane-reeds with my pens...
...forth into the world: “they are the bleached regrets / of an old man’s memoirs, printed stanzas / showing their hinged wings like wide open secrets.” The “bleached” quality of his thoughts is not due to his age alone; the poet is presenting himself to the world—starkly and without dissemblance...