Word: couplet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Though a few of the Burton Lane songs-notably Old Devil Moon and Look to the Rainbow-are imperishable, most of the score is as withered as the scenario. The few attempts at updating by E. Y. Harburg, who wrote the lyrics, are ludicrous. In 1947 one couplet...
...period as it liked to picture itself: a time of grace and intelligence, when irony could conquer sentimentality and laughter would always overwhelm tears. Her chief reputation was as a quipster, the Guinevere of the Algonquin Round Table. Hers was the tongue heard round the world. Her famed couplet, "Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses," not only set a style for lonely movie heroines but may well have spurred the development of contact lenses. During the long Victorian era, wit had hardly been considered a feminine attribute. Dorothy Parker proved again that bitchiness could be the soul...
Long ago J.W.Duff, one of the standard historians of Latin literature suggested that Juvenal's pointed hexameters might better be rendered in English with the use of blank verse than with the rhymed heroic couplet,Johnson notwithstanding. This, because blank verse, as the traditional meter of English narrative poetry might evoke for English readers of Juvenal what that poet, following the examples of Lucilius and Horace, evoked for Roman readers of satire: the suggestion of an ironic tone through the epic ring of the hexameter, used for very serious purposes by Lucretius and Virgil. Lowell has done exactly this...
Moral Breakdowns. As a prologue to Shantung Compound, Gilkey approvingly quotes Brecht's sardonic couplet: "For even saintly folk will act like sinners,/Unless they have their customary dinners." To his surprise, Gilkey discovered that the most devout missionaries were not immune from selfishness. Even ministers began to squabble with their fellow prisoners bout food shares and steal from communal supplies. Forgetting the lesson of the Good Samaritan, missionaries with families bluntly refused to share any portion of their living area with others who needed space. One preacher went so far as to contend that he needed extra room...
...back to her flat to spend the night. The next morning, in an Auschwitz all her own, she executed what one critic calls her "last unwritten poem." The epithet is appropriate. In the last week of her life she laid bare the heart of her art in a clouting couplet...