Word: poem
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...clear about what they seek in poetry. Says Mount Holyoke Poet and History Professor Peter Viereck: students "crave the ever more shocking and ever more new. They are looking more for emotional release than purely artistic merit." Verse for edification or moral uplift; he adds, "is totally dead. A poem like Tennyson's Merlin and the Gleam would be the laughingstock of a coffeehouse today...
...pick one up you feel you've read it before. The problem with poetry is that it doesn't necessarily have the connection with life and can be rather obscure. But poetry has the wonderful short thrust. By the time you get to the end of a poem, there's a whole interpretation of life in 70 lines or less. It's hard to get that in a novel, hard to get the heightening, hard to leave things out. And amid the complex, dull horrors of the 1960s, poetry is a loophole...
Lowell plodded doggedly into an epic on the Crusades. His first published poem, Madonna, was pretty bad, even for a school magazine: Celestial were her robes; Her hands were made divine; But the Virgin's face was silvery bright Like the holy light! Which from God's throne Is said to shine...
...Iliad: "Its magnitude and depth make it almost as hard to understand as life." So soon, Lowell had put art and life on a parity. At Harvard, he lolled in his room, surrounded by prints of Leonardo and Rembrandt, listening to Beethoven on his phonograph. He wrote poems full of violence and foreboding, black roses, a "plague" that "breathed the decay of centuries." No one then at Harvard was interested, so Lowell took his verses to Robert Frost, who was living near by. Frost read the first page of the Crusades opus. "You have no compression," he said, and then...
Somewhere under all of that basaltic opacity and frentic word-accumulation something, presumably, is being expressed. The obscurity of the diction (an alembic is anything which distills or refines) and the ambiguity of the description reduce the poem to a mere order of words unified by consonant repetition and inarticulate verbal echoes...