Word: poet
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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TIME, recognizing this perennial responsibility of poets, recognizes also its own journalistic responsibility to name poets poets, poetasters poetasters, and poeticules poeticules. For the poets' effort to make words make sense is an effort to make the thing on which all human communication-letter-writing, conversation, journalism, literature-ultimately depends. To the extent that poets fulfill their poet-hood they are making human communication more possible. To the extent that poets lapse into poetastiness or poeticulosity they are perverting or muddling human communication...
...poet committed to the task of making words make sense, Laura Riding prefaces her poems with one of the most straightforward yet complete declarations of a poet's purpose yet published. "A poem is an uncovering of truth of so fundamental and general a kind that no other name besides poetry is adequate except truth. . . . Truth is the result when reality as a whole is uncovered by those faculties which apprehend in terms of entirety, rather than in terms merely of parts. The person who writes a poem for the right reasons has felt the need of exercising such...
...poet as well...
This literal translation from the late German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke gives a crude but not misleading idea of Rilke's utter reliance on beauty as a human achievement that needs no advertising. No greater justification for Rilke's reliance could be found than the spirit in which his translator, M. D. Herter Norton, has done Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Norton, $2.50). In Translator Norton's foreword, she explains with noteworthy clarity that although all of a poem is lost in translation, no real poem can ever really be lost. In translation...
...book is less a collection of poems than a clinical exhibition. Its stated purpose is to make not words, but Merrill Moore, make sense. Accordingly, though the book occasionally and happily deviates from its stated purpose, most readers will count Merrill Moore neither poet, poetaster nor poeticule, but a scientist drunk with words...