Word: parson
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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YOUNG MEN are impatient with convention. The whole age is impatient with convention, or what it understands by the term. Yet Professor Lowes' course in Nineteenth Century poetry remains paradoxically popular. Mr. Parson's book (his first, by the way) is dedicated to Mr. Lowes . . . "who, in an age of revolt, eloquently defends the beauty of convention." The dedication is deserved, the book not unworthy of its dedicates...
...Parson is not a young man as undergraduates count a man's years. Yet his verse has these qualities of a young man's verse: it is frankly derivative, it is fresh, it is largely emotional. Mr. Parson's prosodic and critical models happen to be Keats and John Lowes rather than Pound and Eliot. And a reading of this book, in comparison with much of the young men's verse of today, makes one wonder if Mr. Parson's preference is not something more than respectable...
There are Keatsean echoes in the title poem. And more than echoes. Here is a poet at work on one of the curious monuments of our times, giving it that inner meaning without which nothing is worth anything. Indeed, it is this reviewer's opinion that Mr. Parson poem ought to be exhibited along with the glass flowers themselves; that every viewer of these "mimic plants" ought to read this poem as he stares in curious fascination at them. For Mr. Parson has symbolized them, has defined them as the idle curiosity they really are, their verisimilitude to nature only...
...days the Rev. Claude Williams, asked by the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union to preach Weems's funeral sermon, left Memphis accompanied by Willie Sue Blagden, Memphis social worker, to investigate Weems's death and gather material for his obituary. At Earle, they were seized by vigilantes. Parson Williams was given 14 thumping whacks with a mule's belly strap. Then Willie Sue Blagden got four solid clouts. Governor Futrell and the local sheriff protested that the Weems "funeral" was only propaganda, that Frank Weems was still alive, but their pooh-poohing paled beside a published photograph...
...domain unless some scapegoats were hanged. For some unexplained reason, Kidd did not try to implicate his backers, who for their part sacrificed him without a qualm. So Kidd's life was ended at 56, and his immortal notoriety begun. At his execution he shocked the attendant parson by being "inflamed with Drink, which had discomposed his mind, that it was in a very ill frame...