Word: poem
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...ideals, saturnalian revelry, and comic twists of fate that they beg for modernization. Claiming such undertakings to be bastardizations, staid classicists might curse the lack of inspiration, the sterility of these transformations. "Myths," said Camus, "are made for the imagination to breathe life into them." John Gardner's epic poem, Jason amd Medeia shows that the modern imagination, violently panting while it makes love to mythology, is still very potent indeed...
...poem, divided into 24 parts, is a cumulative free-translation/interpretation of the full mythic cycle of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Taking as its sources the Argonautica of Apollonios Rhodios and Euripides's Medeia, its story goes as follows: Jason, feared by his uncle, Pelias, king of Iolcus, because an oracle has said Jason will kill him, is sent to fetch the Golden Fleece in the eastern land of Kolchis. Pelias has promised Jason the kingdom--if he can return. Jason reaches Kolchis and finds the Fleece well protected by Aeetes, king of Kolchis. But Medeia, the sorceress princess...
There is a mournful formalism about Akhmatova's poetry, a quality that shaped her sentiments in much the way that the laws of nature dictate the beauty of crystals. Her life is reflected in the cold facets of her art. Early poems tell of her unhappy marriage to the Russian poet, Nikolai Gumilyov. A short poem dated 1911 ends: He couldn't stand bawling brats,/ raspberry jam with his tea,/ or womanish hysteria . . . And he was tied...
...marriage dissolved (Gumilyov was later shot by the Bolsheviks), and she withdrew into a brief marriage to an Assyriologist. Unlike many well-known artists, Akhmatova chose to remain in Russia. I am not one of those who left the land/ to the mercy of its enemies begins an uncompromising poem that goes on to be unnecessarily contemptuous of those who fled...
Joining Russia's "inner immigration" of outcast writers and thinkers, Akhmatova lived during the '20s and '30s by translating and scholarship. Stalin's purges, which saw the jailing of her own 20-year-old son, sent her into a new creative cycle. The poems of this period scarcely disguised her bitterness. Shah of the Shahs,/ blessed in Allah's eyes,/ how well did you feast?/ You hold the world in your hand/ as if it were a cold bright bead . . ./ But what about my boy,/ did you enjoy his taste? Although the poem was titled...