Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...epic lives, passionate ideals, saturnalian revelry, and comic twists of fate that they beg for modernization. Claiming such undertakings to be bastardizations, staid classicists might curse the lack of inspiration, the sterility of these transformations. "Myths," said Camus, "are made for the imagination to breathe life into them." John Gardner's epic poem, Jason amd Medeia shows that the modern imagination, violently panting while it makes love to mythology, is still very potent indeed...
PARADOXICAL, you might say, to begin at the end. But then, Gardner revels in paradox. In fact, his poem is not actually poetry at all. In the deep recesses of the classical unrhymed hexameter narrative lurks the novelist's imagination, concerned more with mechanics than pure, precise wordsway. John Gardner cannot deny his place in the traditional world of Henry James and the Novel of Ideas. Jason and Medeia affirms that fact once more...
...poem also remains a testament to Gardner's virtuoso technique, his deft control of the cumbersome epic. Take, for example, his handling of the narrative point of view, his own relationship as writer to his story. The first person narrator is cast into an epic-dream, brought to Corinth by the gods to record for posterity the sad details of Jason's split from Medeia. While this anonymous poet is only a neutral observer, he tries desperately to alter the course of events by reconciling the couple. Only Medeia can see him, and she thinks he's a devil. Gardner...
...finally that reason alone is not good enough in Jason's absurd world, and that men cannot deny the passions of their bodies. The philosophical argument is set: reason vs. love, mind vs. body, nature vs. civilization, law vs. chaos. And through it all there is another voyage. John Gardner too, has set out on an impossible quest. Oddly enough he has Jason pronounce his presence...
...GARDNER Lindzey, professor of Psychology and chairman of the Department of Psychology and Social Relations, comments about this identity crisis: "Clinical psychology inevitably involves some substantial degree of professional training. In an arts and sciences faculty, professional training always seems out of place. There is a sort of built-in conflict between the basic values of arts and sciences faculties and the basic training needs of a professional program...