Word: ballads
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...this period, Oscar Wilde wrote his Ballad of Reading Gaol. A great fan of the dandy Irishman, Gertrude could hardly bear that the author of such ethereal tales as "The Nightingale and the Rose" was in prison. Her writings show that she reacted wholeheartedly to literature; while Pembroke, by Mary Williams, made her feel soul-sick, Marius the Epicurean left her dissatisfied...
What raises Zhivago above technically better-made novels is that it is charged with moral passion. On the very first page, Pasternak evokes an old Russian ballad that sets the tone of the novel and suggests the elaborate symbolic substructure he has given his book. The ballad, dating from the period when being buried alive was a commonly felt terror, contains the line "Who are they burying? The living! Not him, but her." Thus in the second paragraph of Doctor Zhivago, a funeral procession is described: "Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: 'Who is being buried...
...condemned man. Around the imminent hanging of such a man, who himself never appears on stage, Irish Playwright Brendan Behan, sometime I.R.A. man and jailbird (see SHOW BUSINESS), has set down a clearly on-the-spot account. As in that memoir of another Irish Prisoner-Playwright, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Quare Fellow records the atmosphere, the emotions, the tensions of convicts and gaolers as execution nears. But, in Behan's play, as atmospheric pressure mounts, the need for outlets intensifies. Voices are raised, and fists; a half-brutal, half-compulsive humor dominates; the hangman gets drunk; officials...
...magazine called Halfway Down appeared in 1925, and was continued under the name of The Bay Tree until 1926. This was an attempt to revive the Radcliffe Magazine, and contained the same type of contributions. The following is an excerpt from a ballad...
That legend was a legacy of bitterness to Janie Jones, Casey's wife, mother of his daughter and two sons. For the next 58 years she lived with The Ballad of Casey Jones-and with the cruel lines added to a Negro engine wiper's mournful song by a Tin Pan Alley hack. "The Casey Jones song has haunted my whole life since the beginning of the century," she once said. Memphis railroaders were known to fight with strangers who sang the slanderous lines. For a while, the ballad was banned in Jackson, Tenn., where Janie Jones lived...