Word: poemes
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...year, according to scholars, that Matthew Arnold wrote his poem Dover Beach, England was the richest, most powerful, most industrially sophisticated nation in the world. Progress was the nation's goddess, in whose honor was staged the Great Exhibition of 1851, a festival of English wealth and material advancement. While England celebrated itself, Arnold was on his honeymoon in the seaport town of Dover, writing a brief poem that eventually would be remembered by many more people than would remember the Great Exhibition, indeed would become the most anthologized poem in English. But Dover Beach was not a celebration...
Exactly where Mr. and Mrs. Arnold honeymooned, no one seems to know. In fact nothing in the Dover town records or in the town history books mentions Arnold or his famous poem. If the Arnolds stopped at the grandest of the town's hotels in 1851, it would have been the Lord Warden, a square, elegant, four- story structure where Dickens gave readings and Napoleon III stayed the night. In those days one would not simply hop a train after a ship ride, but would plan to spend some restful time in Dover before proceeding inland...
...racked with disillusionment about a "world which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new," but that had "neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." The only way to survive what Arnold in another poem called "this strange disease of modern life" was for people to "be true to one another" ("I've got you, baby./ You've got me"). He pledged constancy to the woman near...
...tried to demonstrate that capitalism, freedom, and art are related and, in fact, inseparable. I thought that a home-run hit by Babe Ruth was, in some sense, comparable to The Waste Land, the revolutionary and explosive poem published in 1922 by T.S. Eliot...Cash, of course, made possible the revolution in technology, industry, and, I argued, art. I suggested that Marxism is a reactionary ideology, a fearful revolt against man's natural desire for freedom and the almost limitless possibilities presented to be who has money...
...laughter and applause whenever O'Neill's eyebrows started moving con brio. Afterward the Speaker confessed that he had a private rehearsal at home, with his grandchildren prompting "Pop-Pop" whenever he flubbed a line. "It's been 30 years since I've read the poem," he twinkled in his best jolly-old-elf style. Is O'Neill perchance contemplating a stage career when he retires in 1986? "Naw," says the Speaker, "I think I'll just do a little teaching...