Word: poet
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...country. He passionately championed the cause of the Italian sociologist, Pareto. His critical haymakers included swings at Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Marx, reformers and believers in planned societies, Van Wyck Brooks, progressive education. With enthusiasms just as intense as his animosities, he called Robert Frost "the finest American poet, living or dead," raged at critics who did not agree. The back pages of the Saturday Review continued to be given over to literary double-crostic puzzles and the meandering pleasantries of Christopher Morley and old Q; but up front each week readers got the most violent U. S. criticism since...
...POET'S LIFE-Harriet Monroe-Macmillan...
Last week the story of Poetry was meticulously told in Harriet Monroe's posthumous autobiography (she died Sept. 26, 1936). Although that story was the climax of her career, it made up the dullest chapters of her book. Long (488 pages), overcrowded with the names of poets, A Poet's Life seems both tired and genteel, as if Harriet Monroe had made a last attempt to make her vehement, impoverished, helter-skelter poets intelligible and respectable to plain middleclass, middle-Western citizens, but found their careers as contradictory as their poems...
Poetry introduced an extraordinary group of poets to the U. S., from Yeats and T. S. Eliot to Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Almost every contemporary English and American poet of distinction appeared in its pages or was involved in its battles. But although readers of A Poet's Life can gain some insight into modern poetry, may pick up minor items of literary information (such as Louis Untermeyer's smug dismissal of Eliot's first poems), they are likely to be left wondering how so much literary excitement could have been made so dull...
...Thomas Russell, the overseer of Shakespeare's will, identifies the bard tenuously with groups of Catholic conspirators, but fails to catch him in any political activity. Result: a series of good thumbnail biographies of forgotten Elizabethans, throwing more light upon the turbulent times than on the tranquil poet...