Word: modernly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rubenstein in his vigorous sketches has caught every activity of the miners and has portrayed it faithfully and realistically. It is to his great credit that, unlike most modern artists who are concerned with industrial scenes such as here, Rubenstein avoids any speculation on the hard lot of the workers and refuses to do any false propagandizing to improve their lot. He treats his subjects straightforwardly and takes the good and the bad alike as they come along...
...There has always been a great deal about Harvard that I do not care for," writes Granville Hicks '23 in his defense of his own viewpoint in "I Love America," just off the Modern Age presses...
There is no primer of modern poetry. Readers who are intimidated by its obscurity soon find that most prose explanations tend to become almost as obscure as the poems, and generally duller. And they usually conclude, sometimes with a feeling that they may be missing something, but more often with a conviction that they are not, that contemporary poetry is a doubtful contribution to the world they know. John Crowe Ransom's The World's Body is not a primer of poetry, but it contains one of the clearest explanations of the obscurity of contemporary verse which...
Professor Ransom does not so much defend the obscurity of modern poets as give a lucid explanation of its cause. He says that poets, once bards, patriots and men of public importance, now seem wilfully determined to destroy the prestige that their predecessors have courted for generations. If they write "pure" poetry, like Wallace Stevens, their poems have no moral, political, religious, or sociological values, and their technical dexterity is spent on subjects that have no importance. If they write "obscure" poetry, like Allen Tate, their subjects are important, but they deliberately complicate their lines as if afraid of being...
...just as archaic diction seems false, so does archaic temper, and living poets' art must be as "contemporaneous as our banking or our locomotion." In the modern world people seek "isolated perfections" in the different realms of human life, poets no less than others. Professor Ransom deplores this, because it makes the beauty of "pure" poetry cloistered and the beauty of "obscure" poetry teasing and evasive. As a means of bringing poetry back to the position it once held, he suggests that writers study those elements in human experience that cannot be dissociated. But, he says, he makes...