Word: poems
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...authors' hope of disclosing what was going on in the minds of the Kamikaze men-among them Admiral Onishi. With Japan's decision to surrender, marking the failure of his divine wind, he committed harakiri. At its organization, Onishi had presented the Kamikaze staff with a launching poem...
...autobiographical sketch: "Oh Lord! That forest was full of everything that morning! The sun was piercing it in all directions . . . And like the light and shadows shimmering in the forest, like the singing birds flitting from branch to branch, sections of Scriabin's Third Symphony or Divine Poem, which was being composed at the piano in the neighboring house, spread and echoed under the foliage." The adolescent Pasternak decided that he was "destined for music." But crestfallen that he lacked absolute pitch and that he could not even properly play what he had composed. Pasternak abandoned music after...
Intriguingly enough, Pasternak had no trouble writing spirited revolutionary poetry when the period dealt with by the poem (1905, 1917) was one in which he could regard the Revolution as a kind of unspoiled force of nature. Sample stanza...
...silence gradually made him a hero with Russian intellectuals and made his rare public appearances S.R.O. affairs. At one such reading, in 1947, a sheet of his manuscript slipped to the floor, and before he could stoop to retrieve it the audience chanted the next stanza of his poem by heart. Eyes brimming with tears, Pasternak choked out "Spasibo Dorogiye" (Thank you. dear ones). At another reading, his listeners yelled "Sixty-six! Sixty-six!", meaning the sixty-sixth sonnet of Shakespeare. The telltale line: "Art made tongue-tied by authority...
...Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, by Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Kimon Friar. Only a very bold poet would have dared to pick up where Homer left off. Greece's late Nikos Kazantzakis did it in a vast, soaring poem in which high adventure, brutality and erotic appetites are finally subordinated to a search for self-knowledge...