Word: poems
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Thus were the bristly experts in the world of literary scholarship arguing last week the merits of a young Kansan's claim that he had discovered in Oxford a long-buried poem by William Shakespeare. If authentic, the work would be the first notable addition to the canon in more than three centuries. Gary Lynn Taylor, 32, joint general editor of the Oxford University Press's forthcoming New Complete Shakespeare, reported that he first glimpsed the find while checking through the Bodleian Library's listing of first lines in the catalog of its vast manuscript collection. He came across...
...wild surmise. All scholars will have to take it seriously." And how has it lain so unnoticed for so long? "In modern times we explore outer space," says Schoenbaum. "But there is an inner space to be explored. An inner space of libraries, where there are wonders like this poem to be found...
Perhaps, but many experts were bothered by a basic question: Could Shakespeare really have written a poem that is so, well, mediocre? "This is a really bad poem, a piece of doggerel," says David M. Bevington, professor of English at the University of Chicago. "The poem itself does not sound much like Shakespeare to me," says Princeton's Alvin B. Kernan. Frank Kermode of Columbia is even harsher. "This is a very silly affair," he says. "True, Shakespeare wrote some bad poems, but the way this one is bad is not similar in any fashion to the way Shakespeare...
...became America's youngest goodwill ambassador. Even before her tragic death in a plane crash last August, the Soviet press had portrayed Smith as a symbol of peace-loving American people at odds with the policies of their Government. In the U.S.S.R., a diamond, a flower, a street, a poem and a book have already been named in her honor. Now comes a Samantha Smith stamp, worth 5 kopecks, or about 7.5¢. The wave of official adoration sweeping the Soviet Union shows no sign of abating. Schoolchildren in Tashkent have formed an international friendship club...
...cynic. His sustained interest is in power and reputation in the literary world. He yearns to be "a real great writer," not a "fake great man" like his father, Harold Spender, a journalist, biographer and author of books on government and mountaineering. Sir Stephen addressed the issue in his poem The Public Son of a Public Man: "When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,/ I was your son, high on your horse,/ My mind a top whipped by the lashes/ Of your rhetoric, windy of course." Auden cut a more attractive father figure, an artist of superior talent...