Word: poet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Cole left on a trip to Italy, his friend William Cullen Bryant, nature poet and editor, urged him in a sonnet not to be seduced by the humanized, picturesque Europe--to "keep that earlier, wilder image bright." After Cole's early death, that image was to get wilder and brighter still in the work of his only pupil, Frederick Edwin Church (1826-1900). Descended from six generations of Yankee ministers and merchants, patriotic and deeply religious, Church inherited Cole's belief in a style of landscape suffused with "a language strong, moral and imaginative." His paintings--mostly...
...real, the pragmatic and the scientifically verifiable had long been resident in 19th century America. But it was brought to a peak in the wake of the Civil War. The journalistic eye was equal, as a transmitter of (sometimes unbearable) reality, to that of the novelist or poet; the camera replaced the draftsman in reportage. This was new. American public culture was now driven by technique--the skills that built bridges and docks and railroads, the scientific laws that underwrote Americans' conquest of their environment. There was no ghost in the machine, only the machine itself...
...writes from experience. But there is no master clef to this roman. Axel reads like a composite rather than a copy. He has spent more than half his years in chronic pain caused by wounds suffered during World War II. His marriage to Sylvia, a wellborn New Yorker and poet, was a mismatch. "Government's the opiate of the patrician masses," she tells him shortly before walking out. Her parting shot is that Axel, former oss operative and friend of Presidents, has "too many secrets, not enough mystery...
...regular program concluded with a gorgeous performance of Schumann's Op. 39 Liederkreis, a cycle from 1840, the legendary "year of song." Working with texts by the poet and novelist Joseph Eichendorff, Schumann dashed off these twelve songs in a few weeks in May--have you finished your term papers? The duo's singing and playing shared a similar exuberance. Upshaw's fierce glares and terror-filled voice in "Waldgespruch" (Wood Dialogue) were playfully evocative of the Schubert Erlkoening, while Goode evoked the Liszt "Wild Jagd" transcendental etude when a line of Eichendorff's mentioned "ein lustiges Jagd," a merry...
There's obvious truth to the idea that physical fitness increases mental alertness. But as Ovid, a Latin poet (whose thousand choicest verses my new-found energy has allowed me the chance to read), points out, "Aliudque cupido, mens aliud suadet. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor" ("I desire one thing; reason persuades me of something else. I see the better way to go and approve of it, but I follow the worse path...