Word: poem
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Highly appreciative of your fine article in the May 6 issue on ''Masterpieces of Chinese Art," and especially of the reproduction of Cowherd, I am prompted to send you the following quotation from a poem by Tu Fu (712 to 770 A.D.) concerning Han Kan, the T'ang Dynasty painter of Cowherd. The poem, A Song of a Painting (in my English version* from the literal English text of Kiang Kang-hu), is addressed to General Ts'ao, who was a painter of war horses preceding Han Kan. Tu Fu, easily one of China...
...Spanish peasants and gypsies Lorca celebrates in his earlier, and later, poems live in a world dominated by death, a world of knifings, bullfights, bloody night raids by Franco's falangistas, but it is death as natural and unconsciously accepted as the moon, or eating, or being born. Their death is a positive force, a feature of the primitive existence of blood and earth they are part of. Death in modern society is by fear put out of mind, that is why the inescapable fact of it is so sordid. It is the difference between regenerate and unregenerate. The poet...
...turbulent, phantasmagorical sensations he took in, to the regulated, steady, time-proven forms he was used to. It is perhaps an easy task to fit a love lyric or an ingenuous little casida into the neat octosyllabic line, but that line would prove a Procrustes' bed to a poem titled Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes or the description of a Harlem Saturday night...
None of the poems in the book is entirely satisfactory; he can, and does, clothe the finest feeling in the crudest language, and ruins the perfection of a poem, inserting some unspeakably bad metaphor, or one that has meaning only for himself. They are not his best poems, but some are very good...
Such treasured paintings have been handed down from generation to generation, each collector adding his own red seal of ownership and often adding a poem of comment in his own hand. For the Chinese art lover, the pleasure of viewing a painting includes enjoying the calligraphy of the written words as an art in itself, deciphering the seals, analyzing the brushwork and drawing. But, essentially, each work reflects one great central theme. For well over a thousand years Chinese painters have been primarily concerned not with the works of man but with nature; their most triumphant subject has been landscape...