Word: poem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bailey. The defendants: Gay News (circulation: 20,000), a fortnightly newspaper for homosexuals, and Denis Lemon, 32, editor of the periodical, who came to court with a button saying GAY NEWS FIGHTS ON in the lapel of his conservative three-piece gray suit. The offense: publishing a poem by James Kirkup, in which a Roman centurion describes his sexual relations with the body of the crucified Christ. Prosecutor John J. Smyth called the verses "so vile that it would be hard for even the most perverted imagination to conjure up anything worse...
Judge Alan King-Hamilton, 72, refused to permit the defense to provide professional testimony on the merit of the poem or its author, a professor of literature and winner of numerous prizes, among them the Rockefeller Foundation's Atlantic Award. The judge did permit Drama Critic Bernard Levin of the Sunday Times and Novelist Margaret Drabble (The Realms of Gold) to testify as character witnesses. This led to some odd exchanges about Gay News-e.g., its publication of pictures from a sex manual for homosexuals...
Defense Counsel Geoffrey Robertson defended Kirkup's poem as "a genuine expression of how one man came to love God . . . a devotional poem by a gifted poet," but the jury was not impressed. By a vote of 10 to 2, it convicted both Lemon and Gay News. The judge praised the jury for its "moral courage" and imposed fines of $1,700 on the paper and $850 on the editor...
...before he was deported from Russia. Solzhenitsyn secretly made a recording of Prussian Nights, now available in the West. The author reads the 1,200-line war poem in the declamatory mode favored by many Russian poets, obviously savoring every line. Trochaic tetrameters and thumping end rhymes roll off his tongue. In an unexpectedly boyish baritone he interjects snatches of song, whispers, conversational asides and other special effects that hark back to his teen-age ambition to become an actor. The voice suits the poem. Prussian Nights represents the young Solzhenitsyn, still a decade away from the fine-tuned virtuosity...
Translator Robert Conquest has faithfully rendered the headlong pace of the poem...