Word: poems
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...clear about what they seek in poetry. Says Mount Holyoke Poet and History Professor Peter Viereck: students "crave the ever more shocking and ever more new. They are looking more for emotional release than purely artistic merit." Verse for edification or moral uplift; he adds, "is totally dead. A poem like Tennyson's Merlin and the Gleam would be the laughingstock of a coffeehouse today...
...issue's cover proudly announces the publication of six early poems by Sylvia Plath; they indicate she was not always a good poet. While the early poems anticipate her later bleak preoccupation with madness and death, they fall far short of the technical virtuosity and the intensity of her later work. More intriguing than the poems are the essays which accompany them. Elizabeth Aldrich's analysis of "The Eye-Mote" (which appeared in Miss Plath's first volume, The Collossus) takes the poem apart and puts it back together in the finest style of New Criticism and, incidentally, gives...
Somewhere under all of that basaltic opacity and frentic word-accumulation something, presumably, is being expressed. The obscurity of the diction (an alembic is anything which distills or refines) and the ambiguity of the description reduce the poem to a mere order of words unified by consonant repetition and inarticulate verbal echoes...
Masefield's pungent realism burst upon English poetry, but his worship of the sea was traditional for a maritime nation and his charming pastorals were long echoes of a yeoman past. His most famous short poem, Sea-Fever, was published with his first collection in 1902 and froze the seaman's world for ever in rolling, hypnotic meter...
Joseph Strick's film of Ulysses is wonderful. For those who know, and presumably love, Joyce's novel (our century's greatest long poem to date), it will be enough to say that the film is worthy of its source. Admission prices, unfortunately, exceed the cost of the book, but those who can afford them should pay them...