Word: poet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Revelation of Hope. And what of the intellectual in a land where privilege has passed to the crowd? The intellectual's true vocation, says Philosopher Sidney Hook, "is critical independence. The intellectual betrays his vocation when he becomes a poet laureate of the status quo. The criterion is neither assent nor conformity . . . My experience has been that most so-called intellectuals are just as conformist to tradition in their immediate circle as the nonintellectuals. Many intellectuals would rather 'die' than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasions when the majority is right." Certainly, says Barzun...
Rising Man. In 1936, two years after Fadeyev joined the presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers, Gorky died suddenly. Then people began asking questions. Where is Isaac (Red Cavalry) Babel? What has happened to Novelist Boris (Mother Earth) Pilniak? Why is the work of Poet Boris (Above the Barriers) Pasternak no longer published? About lesser writers there was no mystery: they had been arrested as "enemies of the people." While they disappeared, Fadeyev became No. 1 man in the Soviet Writers' Union. Disdaining elegant clothes, he habitually wore the party uniform, but he had his own chauffeur-driven...
...sordid world of petty crime and drug addiction that shocked many a queasy reader, but it was so firmly rimmed by compassion and understanding that no one could doubt its literary worth. His new one, A Walk on the Wild Side, reinforces his right to the title of poet laureate of Skid Row, but just as Novelist Algren had to find a new publisher to bring it out, so his old admirers have to reconsider their admiration. They may well wonder if his sympathy for the depraved and degraded has not carried him to the edge of nonsense...
...carries its Eastern-front German soldier-hero to his death while he is still on furlough in the Ukraine, which is about as ironically far as the you-can't-win theme has ever been taken by a war novelist. The soldier, Andreas, is a kind of displaced poet in uniform. From the moment his leave-train begins puffing towards Przemysl one autumn day in 1943, Andreas is haunted by the irrational idea that he is a bridegroom of death being rushed into one of destiny's shotgun weddings. As the car wheels click, he blows a mental...
With avalanche of musical activities in past week and a half, many overlapping like a fugal stretto, reviewer put in somewhat same position as the Japanese poet given task of composing a seventeen-syllable poem dealing with all of the Eight Views...