Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Irish have a well-deserved name for being rebellious, but the fight did go out of a lot of them as their land was stripped away and their leaders were killed or exiled; and some of their self-disgust may stem from not having been rebellious enough. A prose-poem called The Parliament of Clan Thomas (circa 1650) derides the peasantry for selling out to Oliver Cromwell and becoming, coincidentally, Uncle Toms. And after the Rising of 1916, the rebels were actually jeered by their fellow citizens. A few of the noncombatants later came to blather a good fight...
Lowell set his task as the impact of a year's time, and his book is a service to the temperament of his age--a record, an essence, and a unit. Lowell says, "the poems in this book are written as one poem. . . .My plot rolls with the season...
...largeness of impulse--Lowell's ambition to respond to so many happenings--results in uneven inspiration. Some, the beautiful Father and Sons poem for Alan Tate, the Writers series, Caracas, some of the Dream poems, others--are among Lowell's most brilliant. The three poems to R.F.K. seem low-key and common at first-then resonant and vital. The Mexico series on the whole is mediocre--although it has brilliant lines and cadences. Lowell's use of the sonnet to frame his vision emphasizes the uneven inspiration. A few poems are written long to fulfill the form and must take...
After a first reading, Notebook seems to need editing, but with re-reading the book's unevenness is less important. Perhaps the reader learns to use the book, to play with the order and ideas; or with the year in mind the quality and sense of each poem comes to mean the quality and sense of a moment, a day--some flat, banal, moody, hopeful, senseless, surreal, clear, brilliant. And Lowell has the license of the great poet to use dead moments in his designs. The images in Notebook circulate around the poet and his time--describing a curious...
...writing it down-Miss Hayter is unimpressed. She admits that the euphonious fragment was the product of what the poet called "a sleep of the external senses." But she insists that his dreams usually were "disappointingly dull," and suggests that much hard polishing must have gone into the poem after Coleridge woke up. Coleridge generally had chronic difficulty finishing his major poetic and critical works. The last lines of the fragment, moreover...