Word: poet
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...have had premieres at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, horse operas (movie Westerns) remain preeminently the American taste. U. S. composers keep at it, however, and last week a new U. S. opera, The Devil and Daniel Webster, was presented at Manhattan's Martin Beck Theatre. Librettist: Poet Stephen Vincent Benét. Composer: Douglas Moore. Producer: Robert Edmond Jones...
Critics applauded the composer for leaving pithy dialogue to be spoken instead of sung, for his generally apt orchestration and unobtrusive transitions. Like Poet Benet's verses, the music is homespun to a turn. Far less spontaneous and intense than The Cradle Will Rock (TIME June 28,1937), No. 1 operatic experiment with topical U. S. material, The Devil and Daniel Webster is well staged and occasionally rises above self-conscious Americanism...
Died. Ernst Toller, 45, German expressionist poet and playwright (Man and the Masses) ; by his own hand (hanging); a few days after attending a world convocation of writers (see p. 79); in Manhattan. Leader of social revolutionary movements in post-War Germany, Toller wrote many of his works in prison, was exiled by the Nazis, fought Fascism in Spain, worked in the U. S. to aid Spanish refugees...
...Coffin's poetry is that it is too narrow in scope. His treatment of Maine people, Maine customs, landscapes, and feelings, is acknowledged to be of a particularly perceptive and persuasive type, but beyond Maine and a few scattered corners of New England, Mr. Coffin's ability as a poet does not exist. It is said that he is a "regionalist," and that his poems can be understood in their full implications only by the elect versed in the ways of those exceptional anthropoids who carry on their own quaint, inbred existence north of Portland...
...Every poet, I think, ought to be something of a local poet," Coffin says, and thus he expresses the conviction that knowledge of one's subject, contact with it through personal experience, is the main guarantee of poetic inspiration. And as a local poet, he can assume, in his own words, that he is a "representative of the people." There is more than merely a simple exposition of peculiar traits indigenous to Maine in his poems. He who would classify Coffin as a provincialist, limited in scope to the portrayal of a single group of individuals, might as well judge...