Word: poet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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PEOPLE SUPPOSEDLY IN THE KNOW have been saying for years that Irish poet Seamus Heaney would one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of course, people said the same thing about Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene, illustrious authors and notorious nonwinners. Against that background, the Swedish Academy's selection of Heaney, announced last week, qualifies as something of a surprise: the laurel went to someone widely seen as deserving...
That reservation has made all the difference in his art. It is hard to imagine a less overtly political poet than Heaney, 56, or one who has more thoroughly purged his language of the commonplace and banal. "Poetry is more a threshold than a path," he once wrote. From his first published volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), onward, he has produced intense, lyrical works that seem suspended between contradictions--life and death, joy and grief, memory and loss. His imagery is radical, in the true, etymological sense of that word: "The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch...
...Little Night Music and Follies were soon to come. This revival provides a useful vantage for surveying the second half of a venturesome, glittering career. Among those American artists today whose livelihood is linked to words and wordplay, Sondheim holds a unique preeminence. There's no contemporary novelist, poet or essayist who is so indisputably at the top of his or her field as Sondheim is of his. As a song lyricist, he has no plausible peer...
...currents rush and eddy, carrying everyone in directions utterly unpredictable when they are young and sure of themselves. And if it doesn't provide fully developed roles for them, it does evenhandedly offer a lot of underutilized actresses (among them Jean Simmons, Lois Smith and Kate Nelligan and the poet Maya Angelou) a moment or two to remind us how good they...
...knows a great poet who's as great a human being," Stratis said, "Generous, compassionate, warm--and great drinking company...