Word: poemes
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...annoyed Eliot that The Waste Land was interpreted as a prophetic statement: he referred to it (somewhat disingenuously) as "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." Yet World War I had intervened between the writing of most of the poems included in Prufrock and the composition of The Waste Land; and in a 1915 letter to Conrad Aiken, Eliot had said, "The War suffocates me." Whether or not Eliot had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines. Nothing could have been further from either bland escapism or Imagist stylization than...
...Berryman wrote, "Let's have narrative, and at least one dominant personality, and no fragmentation! In short, let us have something spectacularly NOT The Waste Land." But other younger poets disagreed. Charles Wright, this year's Pulitzer Prize poet, first read the Four Quartets (Eliot's World War II poem) in the Army-base library in Verona, Italy. "I loved the music; I loved the investigation of the past," he says. "The sound of it was so beautiful to me." The voice of the Quartets--meditative, grave, sorrowful, but also dry, experienced and harsh--has been important to poets from...
SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963) The searing poems she wrote just before her suicide in 1963 made her a literary and feminist martyr. Her onetime mentor Robert Lowell described her last works as "playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder." Plath's poem to her long-dead father redefined confessional writing: "Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like...
...Chaplinitis," accompanied by a flood of Chaplin dances, songs, dolls, comic books and cocktails, was rampant. Filmmaker Mack Sennett thought him "just the greatest artist who ever lived." Other early admirers included George Bernard Shaw, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud. In 1923 Hart Crane, who wrote a poem about Chaplin, said his pantomime "represents the futile gesture of the poet today." Later, in the 1950s, Chaplin was one of the icons of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac went on the road because he too wanted to be a hobo. From 1981 to 1987, IBM used the Tramp as the logo...
...behind him, and the booing didn't let up until his great songs like Desolation Row and Like a Rolling Stone pierced the consciousness of a whole new generation, making everyone realize that rock music could be as direct, as personal and as vital as a novel or a poem. That popular music could be expression as well as recreation...