Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Faced with this poem, any competent modern critic could easily go to work. He might first allude to its use of alliteration ("few fishes," "few fingers"). Clearly the poem deals with the plight of modern man reaching out for love and innocence but mocked by impending death. Love is the rose stifling in the blind house of modern technology. Note the repeated theme of blindness, and the plane that will bring annihilation to the world. Like the world, human love has no future. And little religious comfort. (The fish was an early symbol of Christian faith, now reduced-hence...
...only way to be sure of the accuracy of such perceptions is to interview the poet. In the case of this one, that would be impossible. For the poem, printed in this month's issue of Horizon, is the first tentative work of a sophisticated computing machine...
...this question, we simply shift the previous argument in reverse: criticism is no more at home with itself than art is. And isn't this as it should be? Isn't homesickness at the very heart of the human mystery? Just as that critical letter yearns to be a poem, so a poem strives to be life itself. Both the critic and the artist are responding to something other than themselves; they may differ in their description of what it is, but they share this common unhappy truth: that whatever it may be, they themselves are not really a part...
...discover these large designs, Commager had to pay infinite attention himself to Horace's constant changes in tone, and to his continual use of literary convention as a mask. In a single poem of thirty odd lines, Horace may shift many times between elegiac intensity and utter detachment. The pleasure of reading Horace is the pleasure of sensing these transitions; Commager has smoothed the road to Elysium...
...students, internationally minded as they are, have speedily responded to the new offer. Brookline sends as many telegrams in one Sunday night as Cambridge does in two weeks, he observed. A frequent habit of Harvard students, he added, is for three or four of them to send some "silly poem" to the President. By the time they said all they wanted to say, even after leaving off the salutation, they had gone so far over the 15 word limit that they didn't save money anyhow...