Word: hamilton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...producing in this literate democratic society of some 230 million people with the leadership of the Thirteen Colonies in the late 18th century. For all its familiarity, the point is still a painful one. From 3 million people living on the edge of a wilderness: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin, the Adamses. (Would these men have survived the scrutiny of a Mike Wallace or Ben Bradlee? Probably so. The press was much more savage in those days.) But perhaps, out of all the mysterious historical chemistries that can produce a golden age-the Athens of Pericles, Renaissance Florence-the America...
...HAMILTON'S BIOGRAPHY is no sensationalized account of the tumultuous life of a man whose fame is taken for granted. The biographer makes no speculations as to why women found Lowell so fascinating. His mission is instead to prove Lowell's place in American poetry. Hamilton's hindsight-fueled comments on Lowell's volumes fit neatly into the episodes of the poet's life. It is this juxtaposition of events and critical analysis which brilliantly destroys the view of ideal art as isolated from history--by making the history helpful, if not indispensable, to understanding and appreciating...
...easier to understand Lowell's break with strict meter when Hamilton includes an excerpt from his Life Studies and describes the conflict many mid-20th century poets faced. The dissolution of conventional poetic form and style following World War I was perhaps the single greatest phenomenon in modern literature. It posed a critical problem for poets like Lowell: whether to jump into the newly opened vista by discarding form, carrying T.S. Eliot's innovations one more step, or to make poetry more powerful by struggling with a fixed meter. Lowell, who had trained himself to write in regular meter, finally...
...debate over the validity of drawing on private experiences as source material for poetry continues: Hamilton illustrates its endurance by raising an interesting comparison between Lowell and his student Sylvia Plath. Plath's line "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through" in her 1962 poem "Daddy," Hamilton suggests, was inspired by Lowell's long poem The Mills of the Kavanaughs, with its line "You are a bastard, Michael, aren't you? Nein." In fact, Lowell was largely responsible for the freedom and Plath and other modern poets enjoyed to include material from their private lives in their...
...major events of Lowell's life--his imprisonment for conscientious objection, his routine hospitalizations and separations from lovers, his feelings of doom in reaction to the deaths of T.S. Eliot, Randall Jarell, John Berryman, and other friends, his opposition to the Vietnam War--are interesting but tangential to Hamilton's defense of Lowell's place in modern poetry. In the end, questions such as insanity and its relationship to love and genius are left unanswered. Hamilton simply leaves us with a wealth of well-presented source material to use in thinking about these questions. It is an important gift...