Word: poem
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Verse is not the usual medium through which Russia's masters express themselves, but last week an obvious political hint was to be found in a poem...
...dead as Old Joe himself. Since early this year, Poet Evgeny Evtushenko (TIME cover, April 13), most popular spokesman of Russia's restive younger generation, has recited for trusted friends an eloquent, venomous attack on Stalinism that he considered too hot to publish. For a while, the poem circulated through Russia's mysterious poetic underground, until last week it was printed in full by the party newspaper Pravda. For whatever purpose, the party evidently wanted to suggest that Stalinism still exists, and that Khrushchev is its enemy...
According to the poem, Stalin is only pretending to be dead. "Inside his grave," cries Evtushenko, "I envisage a phone" whose wires lead to Albania's Strongman Enver Hoxha. In a clear allusion to Rose-Fancier Vyacheslav Molotov, the poem says that some of Stalin's other heirs "prune roses in retirement, and secretly consider retirement only temporary." Some secret Stalinists "curse Stalin from the podium; but then, by night, they long for the old days." To foil their ambitions, Evtushenko pleads...
...Massachusetts family of Life With Father dad, harried mom, newly-wed daughter, boobish son-in-law. Nothing too new there, admittedly, but then mom gets pregnant. And dad gets the gags. Mem: Aren't you excited? happy? [or words to that effect] Doesn't it remind you of a poem? Dad (de-spondently): I shot an arrow into...
Except for a terrified and confusing depiction of Harlem Negroes as Congolese savage-Chiefs, Blood Wedding is Garcia Lorca's most fantastic poem, and his most intense effort to draw dramatic situations from people's most primitive conflicts. Everything is straight and crude: the wedding brings together the son of a powerful widow (who wants him to produce more sons to carry on a family vendetta that killed her husband) and the daughter of a grasping landowner (who wants to grasp more land...