Word: honig
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Harvard's Edwin Honig is one of many contemporary poets who are also full-time teachers at universities and colleges. As such he is in danger of being labeled and passed off as just another member of a group in whose work readers of poetry have come to expect generally good craftsmanship, an unusual precision of language, and disappointingly little in the way of content. In the most important respect, however, Honig breaks this pattern; his poems are indeed characterized by the precision of the scholar, but they try to be serious comments on matters of unusually basic importance...
...these poems, Honig most often adopts a position of removal from the subject he is treating, so that even his description of a very personal incident in "Do You Love Me?" combines dispassion with its emotional impact: ". . . Her dying sigh denies/The quiet settling idly on/His polished shoe. One blunt toe/Gleams back a flawless eye at him/As he dangles from the sigh." The poet reports single acts or aspects of the circus: the morality or the moral are implicit in the way he sees them and transmits them to the reader. And it is at this point that Honig the poet...
There is an essential, stripped-down--quality to Honig's poetry; it is clean of superfluities, nothing is overstated. Thus, without feeling any emotionalism in the author, the reader is aroused and given the mood in a few, terse lines. The poet does not often stop even to arrange a setting, but cuts immediately to the important question at hand, the particular act in the moral circus...
...Spender's attempt to make the poem more explicit is courageous," added Edwin Honig, Briggs-Copeland Professor of English...
Stephen Spender, the distinguished English poet, will give a reading from his poems at 8:30 p.m. Sunday in Fogg Museum. Two critics, Edwin Honig, Briggs-Copeland Assistant Professor of English, and J. M. Brinnin of the New York City Poetry Center will discuss Spender's recent changes in his poem, "Shapes of Death Haunt Life...