Word: poem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...concert of music by Boulez, Horatio Appleton Lamb Lecturer 1962-63, would have understood their prudence; for whether one reacts initially with enthusiasm or horror, he knows that, after one hearing or a dozen, he has heard only a tiny fraction of what Boulez' music says. To evaluate a poem is difficult if it is written in a strange tongue...
...seems clear that Yevtushenko is basically a hireling of the Soviet government, bent on emulating the toadying tactics of Ehrenburg. At the World Youth Festival in Helsinki, where he paraded around in loud Italian silk shirts, Yevtushenko became so incensed at the anti-Communist demonstrations he composed a poem on the spot denouncing the "pimple-faced, gum chewing" students. "If I had not been a Communist before, I would have become one tonight," he said...
...long time coming." He had a physician's strong resistance to sentimentalizing death, but his poet's resistance was stronger still. Death, to him, was the enemy of experience, more shameful than saddening, and the dead were zeros that "love cannot touch." Having long treated patients as poems, Williams once said farewell with a poem that, in all his rash toughness, he might well have considered his own epitaph...
Divine Drudgery. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, downgrading hand labor, raising up a new-rich middle class, and widening the gulf between servant and master. The reduced status of the servant combined with the mealymouthed piety of the 19th century to produce a quantity of parables and poems designed to convince the lower classes that drudgery was part of the divine order and should be performed with diligence and thanks. A New Testament text, very popular for framing and hanging in the servants' quarters, was Ephesians 6: 5-6.* Such sentiments persisted into the 20th century, even...
...last poem in the collection provides a striking contrast to "During the Eichman Trial." "A Solitude" dissects a fleeting emotion: the poet sees a blind man, and is overcome with a feeling of "strange joy/to gaze my fill at a stranger's face." It is a remarkable poem, and it illustrates Miss Levertov's talent to perceive and see meaning in the seemingly inconsequential aspects of our lives...