Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...magnificently missed the point): I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas the total is constantly on the increase. In the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: "Every moment dies a man,/And one and a sixteenth is born." The exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre...
...assassinations and a disheartening election have not openly affected Goodwin's faith in politics. He paused over the name Kennedy while discussing political violence and, as McCarthy used to do, ended his speech with a poem from John Brown's Body. But Goodwin seems to rely less on the success of a single candidate than on his hope for a re-formed progressive coalition...
...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 Until that time, the draft, with other notes and the unpublished manuscript, will remain encapsulated: the New York Public...
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...