Word: poet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...grief-stricken old man, slumped in a bedside chair in a San Juan hospital room, received word last week that he had won the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature. The news brought no glimmer of joy to the white-bearded face of Poet Juan Ramon Jimenez. Honor, fame, and money ($38,633) no longer mattered; his wife of 40 years,"the inspiration for my whole work," as he once called her, was dying of cancer. He stood up and gently patted her hand. Then, reminded that the world expected him to say something for the occasion, he wrote...
...looked after him maternally, ran a handicrafts shop in Madrid so that he could work at his poetry without having to worry about earning a living. Shortly after their marriage, he wrote a collection of lyrics entitled Diario de un poeta recién casado (Diary of a Newlywed Poet), one of his finest works. That same productive year (1917) he published his most famous book, Platero y Yo (Silvery and I), a series of prose-poems telling of his walks in town and country with an amiable, silver-grey donkey. It is one of the great classics of modern...
...strong likes and dislikes. He loves gardens and animals; he" detests noise, the letter G (in his poems he always uses J instead) and most modern Spanish-language poetry, especially the work of Chile's Communist-lining Pablo Neruda. His favorite poet, Jimenez once said, is God. Jimenez' own poetry is lyrical, impressionistic, polished, nonpolitical. Because of the translation barrier, he is little known outside the Spanish-speaking world, but within it he is widely regarded as the language's greatest living poet...
...difficulty with Lamb is to see him whole. Some see only the mischievous little drunkard who "taught one little girl to say the Lord's Prayer backwards," tweaked William Wordsworth's nose and addressed him as, "You rascally old Lake poet!" Some see him as an overelaborate, rather cute stylist; others brush aside what they feel are merely trappings and hail Lamb as one of the kindest, most generous men that ever lived. Editor Matthews manages to include all these Lambs in his selection and to write what is probably the truest, briefest epitaph: "His friends loved...
...INSURGENTS, by Vercors (308 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95). The hero of this odd novel is a weird doctor-poet who puts himself in a state of suspended animation for the good of humanity, or so he thinks. Fiftyish and French but drenched in decadent German romanticism, Egmont no longer practices medicine or writes poetry, but takes drugs and drifts through rooms replete with twisted vines, oddly shaped chemical phials and stuffed animals. As he confides to a friend: "I wouldn't be so bored if someone explained to me what it was all about, here on this planet...