Word: poem
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...demonstrated the interplay of words and music by singing some of his own poems "which wouldn't have been written at all if not for the tunes." The audience broke into applause in the middle of one poem...
...Call. There is one wry poem, surely written, at least in his head, during one of the U.N.'s interminable debates, which suggests Hammarskjöld was sometimes less than happy about his job as man in the middle...
Lowell is the poet par excellence of the particular. Too prosy for some tastes, he insists that poems must incorporate the prosiness of life; poetry must be as important as prose. He ignores the usual poetical devices that are calculated to woo a reader, makes no concession to sound for its own sake. As he describes Hawthorne in one poem, his head is often bent down, "Brooding, brooding, eyes fixed on some chip,/some stone, some common plant,/the commonest thing,/as if it were the clue...
Lowell's latest book of verse, For the Union Dead, is in the manner of Life Studies, but Lowell is making his way back into the world again. The best of these poems have a compactness of phrase that evokes a time and a place with a vividness that comes from "meditation on the true and insignificant," as in the poem, The Mouth of the Hudson...
...Lowell's grim landscape is relieved by people, people hallowed by compassion. Lowell's compassion has been tested. Great chunks of his life have been spent in misery and in mental asylums (an experience he has duly and dispassionately recorded in a poem). Now, for the first time, he has kind words for his father; for Jonathan Edwards, symbol of rigid Puritanism; even for that total tyrant, Caligula: ". . . yours the lawlessness/ Of something simple that has lost...