Word: poet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ethical commandments: Give, Sympathize, Control. But on the way to its ritually religious close ("Shantih, shantih, shantih"), it films a succession of loveless or violent or failed sexual unions--among the educated ("My nerves are bad tonight") and the uneducated ("He, the young man carbuncular, arrives"), and in the poet's own life ("your heart would have responded/ Gaily"). It speaks of an absent God and of a dead father; Eliot's recently dead father had left capital outright to the other children, but permitted his wayward son only the interest on his portion...
...claimed "real life," and in 1910 poetry was subsisting, for the most part, on vague appeals to nature and to God. Though from 1897 on, Edwin Arlington Robinson had been writing his grim, intelligent poetry of American failures (Miniver Cheevy among them), he was not a popular American poet: Joyce Kilmer and Edgar Guest were the poets who sold...
...discontinuous and "impersonal" Eliot of course provoked rebellion in some poets. John Berryman wrote, "Let's have narrative, and at least one dominant personality, and no fragmentation! In short, let us have something spectacularly NOT The Waste Land." But other younger poets disagreed. Charles Wright, this year's Pulitzer Prize poet, first read the Four Quartets (Eliot's World War II poem) in the Army-base library in Verona, Italy. "I loved the music; I loved the investigation of the past," he says. "The sound of it was so beautiful to me." The voice of the Quartets--meditative, grave, sorrowful...
ROBERT FROST (1874-1963) His invitation to read at John F. Kennedy's 1961 Inauguration only confirmed his status as the nation's most widely recognized poet. That popularity stemmed largely from his readability; his poetry seemed to speak plainly, in rhyme. But his surfaces concealed depths. The line "And miles to go before I sleep" at first seems straightforward. Repeated immediately, the words convey a trip toward death...
...AUDEN (1907-1973) The most technically adroit poet of his era, he dazzled readers when his works first appeared in the late 1920s. He struck a distinctive postwar note. His landscapes bristled with rusting machinery and ominous border crossings. He could be chatty: "Let me tell you a little story." He shied away from definitive statements, hedging even his love poems with limiting adjectives: "Lay your sleeping head, my love,/ Human on my faithless...