Word: poem
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...poem of force," French Philosopher Simone Weil once called the Iliad in what must be regarded as howling Gallic understatement. On Homer's blood-drenched plains of Troy, spears cleave through a man's tongue and shatter his teeth or pierce an eye socket. Swords sever heads. Armies mow down opposing ranks like "a line of reapers formed, who cut a swath/ in barley or wheat." Death spreads across the pages like a pool of ink-"numbing darkness," "unending night." Awesome griefs are recorded. Hair gets torn, ashes smeared. But when a mourning fast is proposed, the answer...
...there ever a poem more dedicated to machismo? By the time of Aristotle, about 900 years later, the Greek definition of virtue had evolved into the good and the beautiful. In the Iliad, virtue meant pride in battle, warrior's honor, heroics in the primitive sense. For all their groans, the Greeks relished war. Helen's face was hardly required to launch a thousand ships. To both sides, for nine years "warfare seemed/ lovelier than return, lovelier than sailing/ in the decked ships to their own native land...
Dagger Thrust. Each age must measure its knowledge of war, its concept of force against the Iliad, and that is one reason the poem has been translated and retranslated, from Alexander Pope's resounding version in 1720 to Richmond Lattimore's literal yet poetic rendering of 1951. In Pope, for instance, dactylic hexameters were given their royally cadenced English equivalent to which Homeric heroes stepped rather like late-Renaissance princes. Robert Fitzgerald, Harvard's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and a poet (Spring Shade, 1971) in his own right, has cut back on the pomp without...
MOST PEOPLE seem to have taken a refreshingly restrained view of the Democratic party's off-year charter convention, which is just as well. Advance reports predicted a sort of monumentally dubious battle for the soul of the party. There's a character in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, who may be an appropriate laureate for the party that invented the Vietnam War, with the last word on that kind of analysis. "'You have scarce the soul of a louse,' he said, 'but the roots of sin are there.'" Robert S. Strauss, the Democrats' party chairman, compared the party...
...roll publications seldom discussed the substance of her songs. Record reviews often became forays into her private life. At first the publicity had little effect on Joni's writing. She said, "If I express a truthful emotion that is pure and honest, then I consider the poem a success." But when Rolling Stone published a chart of the rock scene showing her suspected lovers, the spotlight became too bright. Joni fled temporarily to Europe. Even now she calls herself a "media dropout" who seldom reads newspapers and never looks at television...