Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SEARCH OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE by A. D. Wraight and Virginia Stern. 376 pages. Vanguard. $12.50. A pictorial investigation of the one Elizabethan poet who could hold a candle to Shakespeare and who was a trouble-maker as well. Marlowe's route is traced through contemporary prints and present-day photos of his haunts. In trouble with the Star Chamber because of his vocal atheism, Marlowe was killed in a drunken brawl at Deptford, just as the law was closing in. The murder had so many loose ends that historians still wonder...
...views on the West are variable. In Colosseum, he indulges in a prudish flight of fancy; as the poet broods on the ancient games, he also rather absurdly sees capitalist corruption symbolized amid the Roman ruins by "powdered pederasts," "urinating whores," and a "society lady" swooning with delight as a gigolo pulls off her nylon panties. Then again, he takes a good-humored dig at the Western preoccupation with spy movies and has a ball with a Bond take-off entitled Impressions of the Western Cinema. He envisons a future state of espionage technology when even roses are bugged...
...poet is more than a poet in Russia," Yevtushenko has explained. "Here only he is destined to be a poet/ In whom civil sense ferments to passion." With deepest sympathy for Yevtushenko's position as de facto laureate of Russia, it must be objected that to be more than a poet is to be something less than a nightingale. Poetry obliged to make "civil sense" will sometimes make strange noises. In one passage, Yevtushenko remembers, "The ascetic-faced PartOrg said to me . . ." But how can a poet deal with a "PartOrg" (Party Organizer) in any language? The poet himself...
...Laureate. Remarkably, many of Yevtushenko's home-turned verses, so uncomplicated and naive, hypnotize his American intellectual audiences. Perhaps the enthusiasm for him reflects an unconscious dissatisfaction with the disappearance from modern Western poetry of simple values and popular appeal. It is not that Yevtushenko is a Communist poet, but that he is a sentimental Communist poet. Any American producing paeans to the Great Society, better dam construction or Old Glory would be sneered out of the intellectual establishment...
...wagons/ And Peruvians in helmets and sheepskin jerkins," or when he visualizes Marshal Budenny "galloping all over Africa,/ And I, of course, galloping right after him," the effect is quite other than intended. The image of the dynamic poetic dramaturge fades, to be replaced by that of another poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, inflamed with patriotic ardor over the breakfast table and dashing off Form! Form! Riflemen Form!-to be published in the Times, please the Queen, and possibly encourage the redcoats...