Word: poem
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Lowell set his task as the impact of a year's time, and his book is a service to the temperament of his age--a record, an essence, and a unit. Lowell says, "the poems in this book are written as one poem. . . .My plot rolls with the season...
...largeness of impulse--Lowell's ambition to respond to so many happenings--results in uneven inspiration. Some, the beautiful Father and Sons poem for Alan Tate, the Writers series, Caracas, some of the Dream poems, others--are among Lowell's most brilliant. The three poems to R.F.K. seem low-key and common at first-then resonant and vital. The Mexico series on the whole is mediocre--although it has brilliant lines and cadences. Lowell's use of the sonnet to frame his vision emphasizes the uneven inspiration. A few poems are written long to fulfill the form and must take...
...English Romantics were inclined to place their bet on dreams. Essayist Charles Lamb wrote of a friend who used to measure aspiring poets by their answers to his question: "Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" Byron's poem The Dream took on aspects of a Romantic manifesto...
...writing it down-Miss Hayter is unimpressed. She admits that the euphonious fragment was the product of what the poet called "a sleep of the external senses." But she insists that his dreams usually were "disappointingly dull," and suggests that much hard polishing must have gone into the poem after Coleridge woke up. Coleridge generally had chronic difficulty finishing his major poetic and critical works. The last lines of the fragment, moreover...
...first fruit of that freedom was Pale Fire. Spectacularly unread, it made no concessions to popular tastes while proving that a genius can write a brilliant novel consisting of a 999-line poem and scholarly comment on it. The book is a wintry, touching parable concerning two of Nabokov's persistent themes?the feeling of being unloved and the horror of willfully inflicted pain. Pale Fire elicited the high-water mark of Nabokov's critical acceptance. Perhaps the most perfect tribute came from Mary McCarthy, a critic rarely given to generosity or overstatemeat: this work, "half poem, half prose...