Word: poem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Waste Land was a deeply unoptimistic, un-Christian and therefore un-American poem, prefaced by the suicidal words of the Cumaean Sibyl, "I want to die." It is, we could say, the first Euro-poem. In its desolation at the breakup of the Judeo-Christian past, the poem turns for salvation to the Buddha and his three ethical commandments: Give, Sympathize, Control. But on the way to its ritually religious close ("Shantih, shantih, shantih"), it films a succession of loveless or violent or failed sexual unions--among the educated ("My nerves are bad tonight") and the uneducated ("He, the young...
...juice of the past" isn't a bad description of the lifeblood of The Waste Land; but it was a past so disarranged--with the Buddha next to St. Augustine, and Ovid next to Wagner--that a reader felt thrust into a time machine of disorienting simultaneity. And the poem had an unsettling habit of saying, out of the blue, "Oed' und leer das Meer," or something even more peculiar. It ended, in fact, with a cascade of lines in different languages--English, Italian, Latin, French, Sanskrit. Still, readers felt the desperate spiritual quest behind the poem--and were seduced...
...annoyed Eliot that The Waste Land was interpreted as a prophetic statement: he referred to it (somewhat disingenuously) as "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." Yet World War I had intervened between the writing of most of the poems included in Prufrock and the composition of The Waste Land; and in a 1915 letter to Conrad Aiken, Eliot had said, "The War suffocates me." Whether or not Eliot had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines. Nothing could have been further from either bland escapism or Imagist stylization than...
...Berryman wrote, "Let's have narrative, and at least one dominant personality, and no fragmentation! In short, let us have something spectacularly NOT The Waste Land." But other younger poets disagreed. Charles Wright, this year's Pulitzer Prize poet, first read the Four Quartets (Eliot's World War II poem) in the Army-base library in Verona, Italy. "I loved the music; I loved the investigation of the past," he says. "The sound of it was so beautiful to me." The voice of the Quartets--meditative, grave, sorrowful, but also dry, experienced and harsh--has been important to poets from...
SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963) The searing poems she wrote just before her suicide in 1963 made her a literary and feminist martyr. Her onetime mentor Robert Lowell described her last works as "playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder." Plath's poem to her long-dead father redefined confessional writing: "Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like...