Word: poem
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...issue's cover proudly announces the publication of six early poems by Sylvia Plath; they indicate she was not always a good poet. While the early poems anticipate her later bleak preoccupation with madness and death, they fall far short of the technical virtuosity and the intensity of her later work. More intriguing than the poems are the essays which accompany them. Elizabeth Aldrich's analysis of "The Eye-Mote" (which appeared in Miss Plath's first volume, The Collossus) takes the poem apart and puts it back together in the finest style of New Criticism and, incidentally, gives...
Masefield's pungent realism burst upon English poetry, but his worship of the sea was traditional for a maritime nation and his charming pastorals were long echoes of a yeoman past. His most famous short poem, Sea-Fever, was published with his first collection in 1902 and froze the seaman's world for ever in rolling, hypnotic meter...
Joseph Strick's film of Ulysses is wonderful. For those who know, and presumably love, Joyce's novel (our century's greatest long poem to date), it will be enough to say that the film is worthy of its source. Admission prices, unfortunately, exceed the cost of the book, but those who can afford them should pay them...
...metrics of Horace; for the Alsaic stanzas of two of the odes he successfully substitutes short lines with a varying number of stresses. In the "Spring" ode, however, the meter of the original, a strange mixture of falling dactyls and trochees alternating with rising lambs is important for the poem's mixture of moods. Mr.Lowell substitutes a more regular series of five-stress lines, but supplies energy and excitement with repetition, and improves in at least one passage of typically Horatian philosophy by turning a flat statement into a metaphor...
...seven original poems which occupy the first half of Near the Ocean, "Waking Early Sunday Morning" and "Forth of July in Maine," standing first, seem best. But they are all good. The reader of Lowell will recognize much familiar thematic material: New England, the sea, war, religious allusions, classical references, and the effect of technology in the large city. There are quite specific reminiscences (Compare "Forth of July" with "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," for example). Mr.Lowell's mastery of rhyme seems as vigorous as it was twenty years ago in Lord Weary's Castle; indeed, the collections in that...