Word: poem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Someone's voice breaks, then someone's head, then someone's heart. The sensitive man can only say: "If I scream, you will say that I am barbarous; If I whisper, you will not hear me; If I speak normally, you will say that I am indifferent." A great poem, a Vietnam headline, a back-page conundrum all appear the same- mute and urgent; just as a general, a soldier- killing or being killed- and a huckster are all the same size, volume, and duration on television, that magnificent annihilator of moral distinction, which cuts us even as we ignore...
...have only to catch the despair of Yeats's poem The Circus Animals' Desertion. on the awful burden and awful chance of self-delusion in caring for men's words...
Where American poetry has always been inseparable from its origins, remote and rational, obsessed with the poem's existence as an aesthetic mode. Latin-American poets, Germans, Eastern European writers have all shared in the premise that the poem is essentially non-rational; it possesses a logic derived from the illumination of dark rooms, and not from the dour confession of spirit. A poem comes alive the moment that it claims authority from unknown sources; herein lies its identification with itself...
...Homer's poem also treats the bitter matter of choice as the source of tragedy. The hero lived for honor, which had a social and a metaphysical nature. The social was reputation, the praise of other soldiers; the metaphysical was self-esteem, a search conducted amidst darkness for some less venal vindication of a man's being. Tragedy results from the impossibility of living reputably while searching divinely. For the Greeks this was essentially a conflict of religion, in which the waters of the physical world streamed into the recesses of mental yearning. Achilles believed that only the gods' honor...
...with a routine that combined the harmonica and wry, sly jokes about life back home in Indiana. ("I came from a small town. Well, I'll give you an idea of the size of it. It was between the first and second signs of a Burma Shave poem.") His gags-if not his harmonica-caught on, and before long he was a radio star; his biggest years on TV were the mid-'50s (Herb Shriner Time, 1951-52, and Two for the Money, 1952-56). Later his popularity dwindled, but he never lacked an audience for his country...