Word: poem
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JOHN BERRYMAN jumped to his death from a bridge on the University of Minnesota campus on January 7, 1972. At that time his last book of poetry, Delusions, Etc., was in proof and contained a poem titled "Walking Into the River." The poem has since been deleted and does not appear in the published volume. Posthumously published works usually raise questions concerning the extent and character of editing done after the author's death, and Delusions, Etc. is no exception. But even without any unmistakably specific references to his impending suicide, this poetry is clearly the product of a tortured...
...Parliament at Stormont, through which they had used their 2-to-1 popular majority to discriminate against the Catholic minority for more than half a century. One Unionist M.P. summed up the general feeling at Stormont's emotional last session by quoting from Kipling's 1912 poem Ulster: "Before an Empire's eyes/ The traitor claims his price./ What need of further lies?/ We are the sacrifice...
Subtlety isn't one of the play's virtues. Christie's killer sticks closely to the execution scheme that the "Ten Little Indians" poem suggests--which he conveniently displays next to the fireplace. After each ritual murder someone is sure to pipe up, "Oh, that method fits here!" The sexually repressed spinster, the swaggering man of adventure, and the sweet-young-thing secretary are just three of the ten cliches who populate the island. And it happens, of course, on a dark and stormy night...
...tangible, actually existing center of a new dream: the dream of Hollywood, of stardom, of a tacky but imaginatively potent 'glamour. The reality on which that dream was based may often have been cheap and false, but sometimes it was not. Like a popular song, like a mass-printed poem, like a B-movie, it at least provided something to dream about; in regard to dreams, something is always better than nothing. We will remember and miss the studios in the same way we do all of our lost dreams: ruefully, a little shame-faced, but with a bittersweet, nostalgic...
...Plato's Song," a love poem by Plato which Peter put to music, succeeds in replacing the conventional and the overly sentimental with an understanding vocal and with unusual, intricate, evocative music...