Word: poem
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...Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in 1939, is an extended lyric poem, and was the first appearance of "negritude" in print. In choosing the word, its creators had simply latinized the derogatory word for black in French (negre) and attached an augmentative suffix. Lacking in English ****equivalent, the term has no absolute definition. Cesaire chose to show negritude in relation to its negation so as to illustrate its strength...
Cesaire also embraced the struggle of Black Americans in "On the State of the Union," a highly sardonic poem on the murder of Emmet Till, a Black boy who allegedly eyed a white woman. The white Americans are described as bloodless, their hearts made of "tough antiseptic meat...
...political climate has changed since the poem's first publication in 1960 and so has the optimism that accompanied it. Yet Cesaire's poetry of negritude, in its tension between form and content, transcends the particular and is thus an essential chapter in Black history and literature...
...sublimity than all the shootings and elections tune can - muster; that life is short and art is long; and that the skating dance, brief and evanescent as it is, represents a perfection in which the entire universe may be encompassed. Theodore Roethke described such an effect in a poem: "A ripple widening from a single stone. Winding around the waters of the world." Nice. It may even be true. Yet it is just as likely that Beirut is the widening ripple by which everything is framed...
...fullness, more easily erect intricate monuments to Nothing than admit the existence of Something, Libby does not ask if the mystical absorption in death is not perhaps a retreat. This is the only serious flaw in a critical argument that fully acknowledges an off-ignored characteristic of poetry. The poem is only half--the reader is the rest...