Word: poet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...combines a slight air of humor and intense irony to good effect. He varies his rhyme scheme to fit the special tone of each poem, and his rhythm fails only at one point in the last song. Less monumental, but equally effective, is "In Rainwoods," written by an anonymous poet, blasphemously dubbed Sam Hall. The rainwoods contain soft red leopards and a girl and a great sense of wonder...
...that time, Vera has joined the flophouse choir of ministering angels, and Tom, in an uncharacteristically humble mood, is ready to see the light of salvation. He sees it in a piece of transcendent silliness and highly dubious analogizing by a nun who tells Tom that his fellow poet's drunkenness, homosexuality and suicide were simply signs of his perfervid search for God, roughly comparable to the quest and anguish of St. Catherine of Siena. At novel's end, Tom goes off to enlist in the growing army of flophouse saints...
...varies the familiar symptoms slightly by making hers a lost-and-found generation novel. In the pages of The Malefactors, the mourning after the big Paris binge becomes a kind of purgatory on the road to religious serenity. In keeping with its semi-autobiographic overtones (Author Gordon and her poet-critic-novelist husband, Alien Tate, are recent Roman Catholic converts), this book is one of those Mary McCarthy-like exercises in intellectual cattiness in which one claws one's literary coterie in public...
...novel's hero, Tom Claiborne, is a burnt-out Southern poet who keeps trying to fire up the clinkers of his talent with alcohol. His wife Vera is a moneybags and a ninny with whom he has been out of love for a decade or more. While Vera breeds Red Poll bulls on their Bucks County, Pa., farm, Tom holds a running bull session with, 1) the spirit of his rakehell father, 2) the voice of his moral and artistic conscience (it speaks in italics), 3) the bittersweet memories of expatriate days centering around a Dionysian, suicide-bent poet...
...their hellcat playmates from the old Paris days, who has dropped their cultish enthusiasms, become a Roman Catholic, and is running a kind of cooperative flophouse hostel for Bowery bums. Tom pooh-poohs this project and is much more susceptible to a cocktail houri and budding lady poet named Cynthia Vail, who shows him a few of her lines...