Word: epical
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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THIS is a skeptic age--and such periods have never been conducive to poetry, at least of an epic scale. One can readily see how mediocre verse fits in with the skeptic's view of things--it gives him cause to crab at the age's low level--and how their mutual dependency makes them thrive under such consoling companionship. At the same time, but perhaps not so patently, one may see how great poetry must be irritating to the skeptic. But it certainly consoles those with a larger and deeper philosophy of life. One feels as the one ought...
...mess of epics which the newspapers print concerning bitter-faced aviators who fly grimly across oceans and continents for glory or their mothers there should be no word of a flight which began last week at Stag Lane Airdrome, near London. Not an epic but an airy epigram, it told the story of a rich old man and a charming lady and soldier...
...Stalin; 2) Incredible Siberia* wherein a Chicago Daily News correspondent hears U.S. drummers' jokes told in ultima thule smoking cars; and 3) The Mind and Face of Bolshevism† still the latest and most potent Teutonic indictment of Soviet culture. Flayed in the latter book is the famed epic poem of Bolshevism, 150 Million, .by Comrade Poet Maiakovski...
Stephen Vincent Benet, U. S. poet and novelist, arrived in the second class cabin of the Ile de France, delighted with the heavy sales of his 80,000-word cycloramic epic of the Civil War, John Brown's Body (chosen by the Book of the Month Club for August). Said he, "I was not sure that it was a grand poem. I had worked over it for so long I felt I had given birth to a piano...
...Poem. Rustic Homer and urban Virgil used roundly to invoke the muses before composing an epic. Poet Stephen Vincent Benét, however, narrowly and specifically invokes the "American Muse," by crying, "you are the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghost ... a friend, an enemy, a sacred hag with two oceans in her medicine bag . . . and you are . . . the cheap car parked by the station door. . . ." A brief prelude concerning the Yankee slaver that bears its black cargo of misery to America, and quickly the artist sets himself to the stupendous task of setting the panoramic scene, North and South. From...