Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...English Romantics were inclined to place their bet on dreams. Essayist Charles Lamb wrote of a friend who used to measure aspiring poets by their answers to his question: "Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" Byron's poem The Dream took on aspects of a Romantic manifesto...
...enduring power?escapes conventional measurement, but by any standard, the range and volume of his work in two languages is prodigious. It includes 15 novels (nine Russian, six English) and translations of other writers' work. His fiction differs from most novels in much the same way that a poem differs from a political treatise. One is an end in itself. The other, however intricate and elegant, is a means to an end. In a classic sneer...
...first fruit of that freedom was Pale Fire. Spectacularly unread, it made no concessions to popular tastes while proving that a genius can write a brilliant novel consisting of a 999-line poem and scholarly comment on it. The book is a wintry, touching parable concerning two of Nabokov's persistent themes?the feeling of being unloved and the horror of willfully inflicted pain. Pale Fire elicited the high-water mark of Nabokov's critical acceptance. Perhaps the most perfect tribute came from Mary McCarthy, a critic rarely given to generosity or overstatemeat: this work, "half poem, half prose...
...show had impressive sparseness. Wearing a formless sweater, black pants and sneakers, McKuen kept the talk to a discreet minimum and spent his time singing his songs-The World I Used to Know, a medley of Stanyan Street, Lonesome Cities and Listen to the Warm -and reciting a poem about one of his few New York friends, A Cat Named Sloopy. He wandered through a set that seemed to have been plucked from a haunted harbor on San Francisco Bay. If the fog spewing out of the NBC special-effects machine looked at times as if it were going...
...magnificent nineteenth century figures: Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Metternich, Bismarck, Darwin. Music was caught in a vortex of gigantic, lavish attempts at the final romantic masterpiece. Mahler's Eighth Symphony, Richard Strauss's Symphonia Domestica and Alpine Symphony, Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande and Gurre-Lieder, Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy were all part of an increasingly grotesque effort to revitalize the nineteenth century musical syntax. Munificently colored cathedrals were raised upon the collapsing sands of lurid fin-de-siecle romanticism. Self-paralysis, excruciating self-examination, and creative resumption along new paths followed this cataract...