Word: muir
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...story, so effective a device for Homer and early balladeers, may soon return to prominence in poetry, Edwin Muir, Eliot Norton Lecturer, said last night in New Lecture Hall...
Wordsworth's greatness came from his application of inspired imagination to instances and situations in the story of common life; in the modern period Frost and sometimes Eliot have also used this device with much success, Muir asserted in his talk on "Wordsworth: A Return to the Sources," the second of three lectures on the estate of poetry...
...poetic estate is the result of poetry's effect on its audience, and this audience has shrunk to a small circle of people usually associated with universities Muir explained. The public at large, he claimed, merely goes its way, generally without realizing what it has lost...
Despite the public's present divorcement from poetry, Muir said, the appreciation and even the creation of verse were once very much public property. Two hundred years ago people lived in a handicraft culture, and Muir felt that artisans who could produce a fine chair would be more likely to appreciate a well constructed poem than would the owner of a large furniture store...
...Ballads, Muir said, were the traditional folk poetry and it was through this form that the poet and his community could most closely join to create new works or alter existing ones. But even the ballad has fallen victim to contemporary tastes which have been dulled by movies, the radio, and the press...