Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even wilder is an untitled E. E. Cummings poem published in a 1922 issue of Secession: life hurl...
FitzGerald, a mid-Victorian belletrist and amateur Orientalist, carried this principle to an extreme when he translated the 12th century Persian poem The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam. He condensed, combined and reshuffled the stanzas, dropping what did not suit him and pumping in generous transfusions of his own sentimental, post-Darwin fatalism. The result is one of the enduring minor poems of the language-awash with fanciful exoticism, vivid and resonant. But scholars have been scandalized by the liberties that FitzGerald took with the original, and for a century have tried in vain to supplant his version with more literal...
...Shah and Graves was "a clumsy forgery." Replied Graves: "Howling nonsense." The quarrel may never be resolved, since Graves's critics have not been permitted to examine Ali-Shah's manuscript. Thus the lay reader can only read Graves's Rubaiyyat as an English poem and decide whether it speaks for itself...
...Graves often lapses into ungainly syntax, primly avoids rhymes, and altogether misses the colorful, melodious murmur that so entrances the ear and emotions in FitzGerald. He may be deliberately exercising his classical restraint or making an overzealous try for accuracy. In any case, he stiffens the flow of the poem. Here is one of FitzGerald's best-known quatrains...
...reprint from the Columbia University Forum of Conor Cruise O'Brien's "The Counterrevolutionary Reflex," which wearily argues that the United States should not have such a Pavlovian response to communism and revolution, and stops there. The second in particular is Columbia graduate student Samuel Anderson's prose poem, "Mr. Moynihan in Bedford-Stuyvesant." Certainly there are other ways to assert a black identity than by continuing to put down Monynihan. Moynihan's criticism of the American welfare system may still someday make it easier for the growth of a black identity for Negro Americans. One might have hoped that...