Word: poem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...quake collapsed thousands of cave dwellings in the cliffs of China's Shensi province, killing an estimated 830,000 peasants. In 1755 more than 50,000 died in a series of tremors that destroyed the city of Lisbon and inspired Voltaire to compose his moving Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake...
...From the opening introspective Worden poem to the closing Mitchell observation-that the space program was worth the cost and effort if only for the awakened desire in the individual to spread the gospel of humanism-the article discloses the gentler instincts of man so often obscured by his more obvious desire for adventure and success. Like so many apostles, these splendid astronauts attest to a paradox: the more knowledgeable man becomes, the more he realizes his limitations, his ignorance and his insignificance...
...book is more of a prose poem than a piece of analysis. Wills seems less concerned with telling us. What Is to Be Done than he is with setting a tone of hope in the midst of chaos Bare Ruined Choirs is pessimists about things in general, about collective man and his institutions, but tentatively optimistic about man as an individual, starting from himself and then teaching out to others...
Williams attacks his subject from the flank, through the invented journals and letters of Augustus' family, friends and enemies. He breathes life into Old Friend Maecenas, generous patron of the poet Horace but a terrible versifier himself, and the fluttery Ovid, burlesqued by Williams in a splendidly overblown poem. The most vivid character is Augustus' daughter Julia, a Becky Sharp of the Roman salon...
Cavell follows the lead of Charles Anderson, who proposed in 1969 that Walden, always a difficult book to assign a genre be taken out of the usual categories of prose essay or autobiography and considered as a united heroic poem. Cavell carries the redefinition a step further he examines Walden as scripture, a holy book with a philosophical doctrine and a prophetic meaning with hymns and parables, epics and parables, epics and a comprehensible symbolic unity. With a swipe he disposes of such essentially irrelevant questions as the importance of Thoreau's mysterious journals or the divergences of Thoreau...