Word: poemes
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...Waste Land of T. S. Eliot, if not this century's greatest poem in English, is certainly its most famous. Long, difficult and often enigmatic, it is full of quotations. It flits into parodies of other men's poems and prose, and is widely quoted, often unconsciously by some people who may think that the title, which has passed into the language, means a vacant lot. The poem is taught in English-lit classes, and could be called the Odyssey or the Divine Comedy of the pre-Ginsberg generation...
...mean "the better craftsman." In this context, "craftsman" means "editor." It is well known that Eliot's great friend Poet Ezra Pound had been a severe editor who cajoled, bullied or advised Eliot to cut out half of what Pound described, with characteristically inaccurate flamboyance, "the longest poem in the English langwidge" (434 lines in the final version). A facsimile edition of Eliot's first draft, riddled with Pound's penciled comments, will be published in September 1969. Until that time, the draft, with other notes and the unpublished manuscript, will remain encapsulated: the New York Public...
...This poem was chosen because it deals with Berryman's preoccupations with poetry and survival, although it lacks his characteristic humor...
...other than that I cannot see the pattern. It may be something like a movie, with each poem representing a frame that catches one particular mood or incident, but the movie is without a plot. Henry's life has no clear climaxes and denouments. Each instant is equal. "The Dream Songs" starts and ends in the middle of Henry's life. It goes nowhere and proves nothing, but that Henry is Henry and is still alive. The pattern, if there is one, may not be evident even to Berryman, and certainly not to Henry. Berryman says "its ultimate structure...
WHAT IS CLEAR is that Berryman is "tense with love" (279), though "truly isolated, pal," (203). He has wrestled out of himself a "yes" to the world and his own soul, and in the meantime he has created a delightful, profound, and moving poem. What Berryman means to say escapes him, as it must. Like all poets he longs for something he will never find, something he cannot even see. That something fills him with "nostalgia for things unknown" (211), but he knows it is beyond...