Word: lutes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Stringed Lute. Not all Wilde epigrams merely amuse. Many cannot be read without an almost haunting sense of familiarity-because so many of the playful paradoxes in which Wilde turned the world upside down have since become realities. Seeing Lord Henry, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, demolish morality in the flick of an opium-scented cigarette, one is unavoidably reminded that, in the 20th century, whole philosophies have been based on brutal versions of elegant sophistries such as his, and whole armies on the philosophies, and whole empires on the armies...
...character. Few of his poems pass muster today; they are the lush, overripe productions of a man who got "a curious joy" (a "kick" is the modern word; out of being "spendthrift of my own genius" and let himself "drift with every passion till my soul / Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play...
Some five centuries before Christ, the Chinese put together a kind of 3O5-poem treasury of their own verse. Around 484 B.C., Confucius, an inveterate lute player, edited the musical scores for the poems, and told his son: "A man who hasn't worked on the [Odes] is like one who stands with his face to a wall." In this volume. Poet Ezra Pound makes a free and brilliant translation, even to the use of jazz idioms and hillbilly dialect...
Died. Augustin Duncan, 80, veteran Broadway actor (A Man of the People, Lute Song) and producerdirector, brother of the late dancer Isadora Duncan and Poet-Lecturer Raymond Duncan; of a heart attack; in New York City. In the late '20s, at the height of his career, he began losing his sight but continued to act, in 1932 successfully played the part of the blind beggar in Synge's The Well of the Saints, acted other roles with such skill that audiences often forgot that he could...
...armed guards outside the paper's doors, barred the windows and gave staffers revolvers to carry. For its campaign, the Journal won a Pulitzer Prize in 1919. The campaign also intensified the Journal's feud with the pro-isolationist Progressive Party, a feud that started when Democrat Lute Nieman had a political falling out with onetime Republican Bob LaFollette...