Word: land
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...annoyed Eliot that The Waste Land was interpreted as a prophetic statement: he referred to it (somewhat disingenuously) as "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." Yet World War I had intervened between the writing of most of the poems included in Prufrock and the composition of The Waste Land; and in a 1915 letter to Conrad Aiken, Eliot had said, "The War suffocates me." Whether or not Eliot had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines. Nothing could have been further from either bland escapism or Imagist stylization than...
...could The Waste Land--and the sad poems, almost as peculiar, that followed it (from The Hollow Men to Little Gidding)--succeed to such an extent that by 1956 the University of Minnesota needed to stage his lecture there in a basketball arena? The astonishing growth of literacy between 1910 and 1940 certainly helps to explain the rise of an audience for modernist writing. But it was an audience chiefly of fiction readers. Fiction had claimed "real life," and in 1910 poetry was subsisting, for the most part, on vague appeals to nature and to God. Though from...
...discontinuous and "impersonal" Eliot of course provoked rebellion in some poets. John Berryman wrote, "Let's have narrative, and at least one dominant personality, and no fragmentation! In short, let us have something spectacularly NOT The Waste Land." But other younger poets disagreed. Charles Wright, this year's Pulitzer Prize poet, first read the Four Quartets (Eliot's World War II poem) in the Army-base library in Verona, Italy. "I loved the music; I loved the investigation of the past," he says. "The sound of it was so beautiful to me." The voice of the Quartets--meditative, grave, sorrowful...
...erupted in Britain the year before, suddenly jumped the Atlantic and took instant root here. First, in January, came the spine-tingling arrival of I Want to Hold Your Hand--a great, convulsive rock-'n'-roll record that, to the bafflement of many a teen garage band across the land, actually had more than three chords (five more, to be exact--incredible). Then one week later, She Loves You careened onto the charts--wooo! The week after that came the headlong rush of Please Please Me, and by April, the top five singles in the country were all Beatles records...
...supported gun control back in the 1960s, nor the fact that he described AK-47s last year as "inappropriate for private use." To many users, that's like breaking one of the Ten Commandments. Nonetheless, few are prepared to oppose a man who can take them to the Promised Land -- or at least deliver a good sound bite after the next school shooting...