Word: poem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When the state security court sent Istanbul's Mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan to jail in 1998, his pro-Islamic Virtue Party wept crocodile tears. The courts, guardians of the secular Turkish state, had been lying in wait for the charismatic Erdogan. So when he recited a well-known poem at a political rally, it was their chance to pounce. Their verdict was that quoting "minarets are our bayonets"; amounted to using religion to incite hatred - but many believe his greater crime was appealing to voters who wouldn't normally opt for a party with an Islamic reputation. The Virtue Party...
...18th century--springing from a flux of cheap pamphlets, folktales, adventurers' memoirs and religious allegories--it was widely despised as philistine trash, a plaything for an undiscriminating middle class that was hooked on gaudy sentiments and cliffhanger narrative. What we now know is that the verse play and epic poem were about to be shuffled to the margins of the collective mind, while the novel was on its way to becoming the great and subtle device it remains...
...people in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995; by lethal injection; in Terre Haute, Ind. McVeigh spent his last day writing to friends, napping and eating a final meal of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. McVeigh made no final statement, offering instead a handwritten copy of the 1875 poem "Invictus." He was the first person executed by the Federal Government in 38 years...
...U.S.S. Cole, was foiled in Yemen; their trail, too, leads back to Bin Laden. He was in the news again the following day after Western reporters were shown a Bin Laden promotional video in which he appeared to claim responsibility for the bombing of the Cole in a macabre poem...
From Frost’s poem, he said, the near-graduates can learn the importance of a full understanding of their own capacities and limits...