Word: doggerel
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...immortal castaway to Mark Twain's raft, adrift forever on the Mississippi. Alice is still in Wonderland, and the Ancient Mariner is there to remind the buyer that man was a poet before he learned prose and that a child who is fobbed off with baby-talk doggerel is not only being robbed but nudged into the cozy horrors of the remedial-reading set. Treasure Island and The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle may still be bought, and it is a good thing to remember each Christmas that children do not try to keep up with current literature...
...form, the poems range from the most elaborate metrical experiments to Christmas-card doggerel. The language extends from recondite embroidery to rather heavy-handed colloquialism. But Wilson's verse bears the mark of homelessness: it wants to break with the old topics and the exhausted diction, but it cannot get a foothold on the new. The very title of the volume is borrowed from the once-famous work of Edward Young, an 18th century poet, now, significantly, quite unreadable...
...thousand, their works are mostly transmitted verbally or copied from furtive, short-lived poetry magazines with names such as Cocktail and Boomerang. In Moscow and Leningrad, there are hundreds of unpublishable poets who advertise their calling by aping scruffy U.S. beatniks down to dirty dungarees, unkempt beards, and unfathomable doggerel...
...intend to come out in favor of inspired doggerel. But I do mean to say that the success of crudely adorned social judgment and artless personal revelation depends upon the intrinsic worth of the revelation and the judgment...
...loses her two other children, too (one of them is a symbolically mute daughter, another Brechtian figure of innocence), and Mother Courage trudges on, to one of the author's haunting pieces of doggerel...