Word: poetes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS, by Stephen Spender. Mingling on the barricades with American and European student radicals, the Old Left poet and veteran of Spanish Civil War politics reports humanely on New Left ideals and spirit...
Thus Hart Crane in "To Brooklyn Bridge" describes the noon light biting into Wall Street. As a poet, Crane sought "surrender to the sensations of urban life." Out of such sensations, he said, he hoped to forge "a mystical synthesis of America," for which (he told his perplexed patron, Otto Kahn) "one might take the Sistine Chapel as an analogy...
Flung Typewriters. Today, however, the splendor of Crane's intention is winning him a more tolerant audience. This is especially true among poets sharing his faith in the word as "object." It is also true among academic critics like Columbia's John Unterecker, whose Voyager is the second serious study of Crane's life to appear since Philip Horton's adventurous Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet...
...oldtimers, whose swooning maidens entered the amatorial bout with timorous displays of budded rotundities, swelling hillocks, portals of ecstasy and other geographical purlieus quite foreign to Gray's Anatomy. When it comes to a seduction scenario, few contemporary eroticists could match the subtlety of an anonymous 17th-century poet in reciting a pastoral love-in between a fair lad and a group of fair ladies (all of whom become pregnant). Even the title of the poem, Narcissus, Come Kiss Us! (And Love Us Beside), would assure a rock recording of the lyrics a top ten rating in Billboard...
...poetry, as in politics, the predominant quality of the man who wrote these lines has not so much been talent or intellect as extraordinary compassion. A near Marxist as well as a poet during the years of the Spanish Civil War, Stephen Spender has worn reasonably well since he served as Auden's slightly junior fellow in the vanguard of English verse. Now an uncomplacent 60, he knows that nothing turns off a young radical quicker than old radicals who say "When I was a boy ..." Yet ironically, compassionately, he sees the New Left making many...