Word: byzantium
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...despite the fact that its author has been Boylston professor of rhetoric here for the past six years. Unlike William Butler Yeats, whose far-roving mind soon strayed from the lake isle of Innisfree, Heaney is a stationary poet, taking few side-trips to Cambridge or California, let alone Byzantium. His verses are circumscribed by the ancient parameters of the Celtic-Norse world, borders that almost everyone else has forgotten...
...things were in a sense the general aesthetic or historical property of the people -- which did something to mitigate the anticlerical rage of the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks in Russia -- did not arise in 17th century England, whose churches were stripped and gutted as thoroughly as those of Byzantium had been by the Frankish thugs of the Fourth Crusade...
...through technology, or rediscover their spiritual amplitudes, for good or ill. To be fully conscious, even of the worst, seems preferable. Tom describes a sunfish caught in a local bayou: "The colors will fade in minutes, but for now the fish looks both perfectly alive yet metallic, handwrought in Byzantium and bejeweled beyond price, all the more amazing to have come perfect from the muck." An engineered life would leave no room or tolerance for such perceptions...
This poet is a hard taskmaster. He wants his readers to clear their senses of the cant and iconography that fog perceptions. His highest value is individualism as evolved by Western civilization. He skips through history to find something rotten in Byzantium, the "delirium and horror of the East." There is also the calamity of modernist architecture: "Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the color of an upturned grave." The flip side of this disgust is nostalgia. Though Brodsky overwhelms with startling insight and provocations, he is most affecting in "In a Room and a Half," an account...
...organizers of the event should be congratulated because they have succeeded in their primary goal. Over the years, Women's History Week has grown along with interest in the role of women in history. This year's program includes lectures on subjects as diverse as women in 13th century Byzantium and the role of women in present-day South Africa. Harvard no longer completely ignores women's history, and Harvard students can now take courses like History 1326, Women and Social Change in Europe...