Word: poet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Touch of the Poet is one of the two plays in Eugene O'Neill's projected eleven-play cycle that were not torn up. Originally intended to introduce the whole family chronicle, Poet takes place in 1828 in a tavern near Boston. Here, as elsewhere, O'Neill dramatizes in the agitated course of a day the downward course of a lifetime. As elsewhere too, O'Neill tells of one whose life would crumble but for his dreams and whose dreams themselves fall apart at last. And as so often in O'Neill, Poet has centripetal...
...ruined family, Con, among a rising one, is both broken and reborn-enough Americanized to raise a glass to the plebeian Andrew Jackson. In both plays the character is superior to the action: where in Juno and the Paycock there is too much contrived melodrama for inevitable tragedy, in Poet there is too much lurking farce for great drama. In its half-dozen best scenes, A Touch of the Poet has a tense, grandly flaring quality of theater. But there are not only letdowns of both flatness and verbosity; there is never the squared, cubed, nth-powered intensity of cumulative...
...internal rhyme, and rhythmic variety, yet rarely seem splashy. Moreover, Starbuck has successfully used slang to aid rather than preclude intelligibility. The sense of the well sustained poem is a rare combination of sophistication and humanitarianism--a "Wasteland" reconsidered, as it were, featuring Boston, Jonathan Edwards and the poet...
...Circulation is a record 829,817, an increase of 43,661 over last year; ad revenues are up 12.4% this year. The $1 anniversary issue carries $1,040,000 worth of ads, and articles that are hardly for hairy-chested males or boudoir bounders: musings on his craft by Poet Robert Graves, blasts against conformity by Educator Robert Hutchins, and the early thoughts of Playwright Arthur Miller on his forthcoming movie about street gangs. Gone are the busty girls...
Holy Concubines. The novel's first-person narrator, Ray Smith, is 1) a poet, 2) a coast-to-coast freight-hopping, hitchhiking bum, and 3) a species of religious nut who visualizes himself "wandering the world ... in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero in Paradise." He is a bug on prayer, and some of his meditations are beguiling, as when he contemplates "David 0. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha...