Word: poem
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...like a beat Keats. Though he produces periodic Party paeans on such acceptable themes as the Communist worker, Evtushenko is celebrated for vividly erotic lyrics ("Coursing regally, your whole body feels you are a queen") that have drawn down official ire for their "scandalous and somewhat noisy notoriety." One poem that raised official blood pressures was about a low-life nihilist-"He wore narrow trousers/ He read Hemingway"-who in the poem's climax loses his life trying to save a drowning comrade. This, to Marxist critics, is "poetic dishonesty...
...Pygmy Cosmopolitan." Moscow's biggest literary furor in months was prompted by another Evtushenko poem, Bdbiy Yar, named for a ravine near Kiev where the Nazis massacred 52,000 Jews. In a moving lament that was also a call to resist the anti-Semitism of Khrushchev's Russia, Poet Evtushenko-who is not Jewish-mourned...
...retaliation for this "insult" to the Soviet people, Evtushenko was berated as a "pygmy cosmopolitan." Last month, more than 5,000 young Muscovites showed their feeling by packing around the statue of Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. chanting: "We want Evtushenko." Their hero mounted to an improvised platform and read a poem, You Can Call Me a Communist, but which pointedly declares: "I will remain firm to the end and never become an unctuous bootlicker...
...Manhattan's Upper West Side. Romeo (Richard Beymer) is a white boy, idol of a teen tong called The Jets. Juliet (Natalie Wood) is a Puerto Rican girl whose brother (George Chakiris) is the leader of a rival street gang called The Sharks. As in Shakespeare's poem, the star-crossed lovers meet and love and find their fate in the ugly shadow of suspicion that divides their kindred. Unhappily, the literary parallel, though it lends the piece a certain spurious redolence of tradition, proves a pathetic fallacy. Shakespeare's lovers seem silly in the gilded palazzi...
...dialogue, a running conversation between student and teacher in which both are actively engaged in the same material at the same time. Education fails and apathy sets in when this dialogue breaks down. Why copy down the lecturer's critical responses to "The Wasteland" before you have read the poem, before you have your own responses to measure his against? And of what satisfaction to the teacher is addressing passive spectators? Reuben Brower, professor of English, complains: "I can't stand lecturing about things people aren't engaged...