Word: modern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From Pound to the Beats. In the 20th century so far, the devotees of the "second chance" have constituted a remarkable poetic pantheon. The Zeus of that lofty company is himself still alive, though he has long since had his say. Erza Pound, 81, now living in Italy, fathered modern English poetry, freed it from excessive strictures of meter, rhetoric and prosody. One of his earliest converts was T. S. Eliot, who sensed the dilemma of modern, urban and areligious man, and whose dry, ironic style and endless rhythmic ways of weaving contemporary sounds are echoed in virtually every poet...
Marbling this blood-tinged fragility is an incomparable richness and density of classic imagery. Lowell draws habitually from the inexhaustible theater of the Bible and loots many mythologies for his art-as well as modern life. He recalls seeing the condemned murderer Louis Lepke...
...modern languages, an abolitionist, Ambassador to Spain and the Court of St. James's, author of The Bigelow Papers, and of course poet and perfervid hymn writer ("By the light of burning martyrs, Jesus' bleeding feet I track"). From yet another family branch came Amy Lowell (1874-1925), who wrote passable "imagist" verse, smoked cigars, and drove a claret-colored limousine. "To my family," says Robert Lowell, "James was the Ambassador to England, not a writer. Amy seemed a bit peculiar to them. She was never a welcome subject in our household...
...Then began a life pattern that would soon become familiar in U.S. cultural pursuits-in which hundreds of the gifted, the talented or the merely qualified would live from grant to mouth, or move, like modern Lollard friars, from college to college, claiming hospitality by right of authorship. The Lowells drifted to Louisiana State University, and then back to Kenyon. Lowell's poetry was excruciatingly difficult and ambiguous; as he said later, "it really wasn't poetry...
...virtually plotless. A suburban husband (Walter Matthau) decides that the grass is greener and the lass keener in the other fellow's backyard. A colleague with a wandering eye (Robert Morse) nominates himself as Matthau's instructor in the arcane rules of high-infidelity. Like most modern teachers, Morse goes in for visual aids: every time he makes a pedantic point the screen lights up with a lively sketch from life, featuring 13 stars in cameo roles as "technical advisers...