Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...plot is not the point. Buechner was concerned with destiny, not destinations, and Woyzeck, sensitively played by Heinrich Schweiger, is a lyric dirge to bruised humanity. The play is as durable and compassionate as the line that might have served as its epigraph: "Every man is an abyss, and you get dizzy looking into...
...name" singer, if any, in Miss Caldwell's production was Mexican operetta star Placido Domingo, who sang the title role of Ginastera's Don Rodrigo with the New York City Opera this season. As Hippolyte, his lyric tenor projected warmly and well controlled, with little hollowness or break between registers. Unfortunately, he is no Bergonzi; Domingo's sound is marked by continual tightness and lack of real ring. Perhaps his singing on unfamiliar French vowels was part of the problem. His acting usually remained typically tenoristic; that is, non-existent. But Domingo's forthcoming reappearance (opposite Renata Tebaldi...
This fully articulate dissatisfaction with the limits of the lyric form led him to adopt a rather insignificant historical figure and build an imaginary relationship with her. "Why did I choose to write about this boring high-minded Puritan woman who may have been our first American poet but is not a good one?" In a way, he says, "she chose me." "Your deep subjects, I'm talking about attempts at major poetry, not lyrics or meditative poems, they come and take hold of you... The point is to throw as much light as possible on her, and apparently...
...Berryman gets away with rhetorical excesses that would be preposterous in any other modern poet. Why? For one thing, the fact that Bradstreet is a long poem checkmates most of the poetics we have carefully engineered to deal with short lyric poems. Rhetoric is permissable when you're speaking in persona and pointing to something very great and very vague: the past. Demands of economy and tactile immediacy are more than satisfied by Berryman's aggressive, spiky, studied choice of words...
...answers can be made. First, every lyric poem is rationalized to some extent on its model. All sorts of syntactic oddities are permitted in sonnets, for example, because they fulfill certain expectations, while the aesthetic order of a poem like Lycidas, random as it may seem today, is regular in terms of its formal cause: the genre. A poem on a "deep" subject--a poem as catholic in its intent as Paradise Lost--has no one model, but uses and subsumes many. Berryman had no model for the Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Harte Crane's The Bridge...