Word: musingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From Homer on, hardly a serious poet has been without a guardian conscience which he called his Muse. To the Greek poets, the Muses were goddesses who led a life apart from the bullheaded and goatish gods but were, like them, bland absentees. After paganism, when Christianity started trying to hatch out a more personal and better world, the Muse turned from goddess to angel-like Dante's Beatrice, who spoke to him from heaven. But with the Renaissance, poets found their angels nearer home and less angelic: in Elizabethan times, on the streets and in the Court...
...Muse of Robert Frost, No. i of living U. S, poets, has been his wife. Since her death, a year ago, he has gathered practically all his published poetry (about a third of what he has written) in his Collected Poems. In the book's characteristically half-evasive, half-outspoken foreword, The Figure a Poem Makes, Frost says: "It [a poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love." Frost's book begins in knowledge and ends in perplexity; but the figure it makes is Frost himself...
...enthusiastic extras were to have received $1.00 a performance for the privilege of serving their muse. However, because of long rehearsals and a special boon by Orson ("Falstaff") Welles, their pay has been raised to $2.00 for each performance and rehearsal...
Apropos of your article re poets' incomes (TIME, Oct. 17), I have been wondering how much Ogden Nash is able to shake the Muse down for in the course of a year...
...good year might net him close to $20,000 but for the past two years Mr. Nash has not seriously courted the Muse...