Word: poems
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Life of Mr. Savage in 1744. Savage provided Johnson with his best study of character--a great arrogant pride, amasing personal charm, and yet both equalized by a knack of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. When George II took the throne in 1727, Savage wrote a poem eulogizing him, but typically made the mistake of praising George I whom George II hated. This was the pattern for most of his mistakes, for diplomatically he was a blockhead. Pope seemed to fascinate him, and together they attacked the men who had once been Savage's literary friends. Here...
...Rainbow on the Road, and the plot is frugal even by Yankee standards. A solid fog of research muffles her characters, but whenever it lifts for a page or two, the sights and sounds of the New England countryside around 1830 come through in a kind of pastoral tone poem...
...poet. The qualities they have liked in him-his violence, his darkly unrelenting, tragic view of human existence, his lines surging with the momentum of Pacific rollers-are all present in Hunger-field, his first book in five years. But they are echoes now. Writes Jeffers in the last poem of the book: "I am growing old, that is the trouble." Even as echoes, Jeffers' themes and poetic voice can still provoke and disturb...
...moves among death, violence and pessimism as naturally as other poets celebrate love and ecstasy. In Hungerfield, the title poem addressed to his wife, Hawl Hungerfield's mother lies in a California ranch house dying of cancer. Big, powerful Hawl sits beside her waiting for Death to claim her so that he can grapple with him and beat him off, as Hawl did once in World War I when badly wounded. Death enters and Hungerfield does beat him off, but the reprieved woman, who has been begging for Death, is displeased. Vengefully she accuses Hawl's wife...
Take, for example, Lucasta Angel and Sir Claude Mulhammer. That Lucasta symbolizes Mary Magdalene, the fallen woman who is absolved through faith and love, is suggested first of all by her very name: Lucasta is a name which, despite its original connotation of chastity in Lovelace's poem, has taken on tawdrier associations in our own time (Anna Lucasta) and can therefore be taken to symbolize the fallen Magdalene. On the other hand, the Western legends which sprang up about the absolved Magdalene almost invariably linked her with angels (in the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance...