Word: poemes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Then You Get Sicker." Anyone looking for marks of the wacky genius will not find them in the Millay letters. She was deadly serious about her work; sometimes she spent months on a single short poem. And she could be much tougher on herself than her dazzled critics: "I couldn't make up my mind whether or not to send the poems, they all seem so verminous." What she wrote to her mother about her sister's first book was the kind of gritty common-sense that would have startled her fans: "A person who publishes a book...
...always gone his own way. His integrity is as iron-clad as that of the man in his poem: my specialty is living said a man (who could not earn his bread because he would not sell his head) An editor to whom he offered five poems sent him a check for three of them and, rejected the other two. Cummings disdainfully returned the check, and the editor capitulated and bought all five. In spite of his publishers' anxiety, Cummings insisted on publishing one book without a title and others with such bristlers as XLI Poems, CIOPW...
...Santayana's last poem, see BOOKS...
...critic, a poet he remained. There was nothing blank, free or modern about his verses'; they rhymed, and what he had to say often sounded like a translation from the Latin classics, with which he was intimately familiar. When he died in Rome last month at 88, this poem, entitled The Poet's Testament, was found among his papers. Read at his funeral in place of a religious service, it reminded many a listener of the work of Catullus, who wrote of life and death in the Alban Hills more than 2,000 years...
Auden's poem is probably the best of the lot: a description of "a plain without a feature," where masses of men march to the command of a dictator and nobody knows "Of any world where promises were kept/Or one could weep because another wept." But even this poem is all too predictable to anyone familiar with Auden's work. Still more predictable are Marianne Moore spinning fine verbal webs, Wallace Stevens in a suavely elegiac mood, E. E. Cummings broken out in lyrical wonder. As for the younger poets, most are earnestly prosy, weary beyond their years...