Word: poet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Lord Vansittart, 75, versatile, vituperative onetime (1930-38) Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, poet, playwright and polemical pamphleteer, longtime foe of German aggression; of lung congestion; in Denham, England. Vansittart established himself as a young-man-about-letters by concocting a French comedy (Les Pariahs) at 21, getting it produced successfully in Paris; as head of the British Foreign Office, attacked Naziism, got kicked upstairs (to the sinecure of chief diplomatic adviser to the Foreign Secretary) by appeasement-minded Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Vansittart admitted he was anti-German ("Germans have killed, tortured, starved, plundered...
Classic poetry, a favorite preoccupation of scholars, has been in low repute in China since the advent of Communism. The subtle ideograms of the poet's traditional language have little in common with the blunt ideologies of modern Marxism, and for that reason China's top Communist, Mao Tse-tung, has long had to dissemble the fact that he is a workaday poet himself...
When a magazine hires a poet to review poetry, it hopes for authority. But it may also invite violent opinions and firm prejudices. Latest case in point: John Ciardi, 40, Boston-born, Tufts-educated poet, critic, and professor. When, in the course of his side job as poetry editor of the Saturday Review, a new book of verse by Anne Morrow Lindbergh-The Unicorn and Other Poems-came across his desk last month. Critic Ciardi communed with Poet Ciardi and then, in 1,500 sulphuric words, poured damnation on it. "I can certainly sense the human emotion that sends...
...Rome, where he is on a leave from his English professorship at Rutgers, Ciardi added more gently: "I think she is a distinguished lady and a great lady indeed -a lady above discussion ... I am not discussing Mrs. Lindbergh, but her performance as a poet." As for Anne Lindbergh, she declined to discuss the matter...
Third item in this batch of operatic rarities: Arrigo Boïto's Mefistofele, newly recorded by RCA Victor on 2 LPs (with Boris Christoff, Giacinto Prandelli, Orietta Moscucci; Orchestra and Chorus of the Rome Opera conducted by Vittorio Gui). Known chiefly as a poet and mighty librettist (Verdi's Otello and Falstaff), Boïto always remained an interesting oddity as a composer; he premiered his version of Goethe's Faust at La Scala in 1868 only to see it booed off the stage after two performances because of its experimentation with Wagnerian techniques. Intellectually more...