Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THEATER On Broadway POOR RICHARD. Jean Kerr is still wearing the life-of-the-party grin from Mary, Mary, but behind the witticisms something sobering denies that life is that kind of party at all. With Alan Bates playing a lyric poet turned wench charmer and lush, the comedy is less funny than Mary, Mary but more probingly perceptive...
...long tour of the Soviet Union, Cheever heard Poet Evgeny Evtushenlco, 31, recite his verse, after which Evtushenko took Cheever, another visitor, Novelist John Updike, and several pretty comrades off to a country dacha for some tonic research into suburban Soviet vodka parties. Cheever concluded that Evtushenko's lyric performance was "the most exciting thing I've ever heard," but he admired even more how Soviet writers have accepted their role as "leaders in life and love...
There are occassional patches of fine writing, but when Schwartz trys to be lyric he gets gooev. And the best speech of the night is stolen from a poem by Yeats...
Lewis said written ballads and other lyric poems have often successfully transformed this "story lyric" without using a tune, "although it helps if you have a folk tune in your head." He quoted poems from Yeats, Graves and Auden as examples...
Lewis sang several other lyrics to illustrate the history of this type of poetry. Elizabethan verse closely joined words and music, he said. The earlier seventeenth century actually interpreted moods through music, but conversational router and metaphysical complexity have both served to divorce the lyric from its musical origin...