Word: poem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Delmore became a member of the Harvard faculty. He joined the prestigious Partisan Review crowd. He began a long poem, Genesis, which he believed would secure his place as a poet and cultural hero. John Berryman recalled his colleague just "waiting for fame to descend...
...poem is a one-of-a-kind, heart-made object. To make one right takes a great deal of silence: also hearing nothing but one's own voice. Poetry exacts its measure of pain, but that is not to be confused with anguish. Anguish is what has obsessed many of our best-known "confessional poets," including Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They also expressed some joys, but in the end depression always tipped the balance. Lowell fought the dank beast throughout his life. Berryman, Plath and Sexton took their own lives when, as Rilke wrote...
...other contemporary American poet has written more urgently and directly about this fatal shunt than Anne Sexton. Her poems were torn from her life as a daughter, housewife, mother, lover, mental patient and custodian of what she called "the excitable gift." The phrase is from her poem "Live," from a collection that embraced such titles as "Wanting to Die," "Suicide Note" and "Sylvia's Death." Plath (1932-63) and Sexton (1928-74) were friends who spent hours discussing their art, illnesses and the ways they would kill themselves. Yet it is difficult to read Sexton's correspondence...
...poet this is a supreme compliment. It implies an ability to move the reader by sheer merits of style, by the sheer force of the words and their arrangement on the page. These two stanzas from the 1936 poem "Cascado" are forceful and by necessity, that is Beckett's necessity, sufficiently cryptic...
Beckett's poems in French reflect this same style, with a few modifications geared to linguistic subtleties. In any case, if there is a slight stylistic difference, the effect does not diminish the most important thing--the poignant quality we know so well in Beckett's English works. The following poem and its translation were written between the years of 1937 and 1938 after Beckett had made his home in France...