Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...somnambulically to their dooms. Williams shares Melville's somber cosmic dread. It was of the Encantadas, the desolate islands of the Galapagos, that Melville wrote: "In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist." And it is "on the beach of the Encantadas" that Sebastian, the poet of Suddenly Last Summer, who later would himself be eaten, saw, as his mother relates it, a skyful of carnivorous birds swoop and attack myriads of newly hatched sea turtles, "tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh . . . and when he came back, he said, 'Well...
...Neal), a defrocked clergyman turned tourist guide, is spooked by guilt. As a man who was barred from his church for committing "fornication and heresy in the same week," O'Neal seems agonizingly nailed to a cross of nerves. Nonno (Alan Webb), a 97-year-old poet, is the prisoner of art and age, struggling between memory lapses to finish a new poem. Hannah Jelkes (Margaret Leighton), Nonno's spinster granddaughter, has invested her emotional life in selfless care of the old man. Leighton's acting has the purity of light...
...past, in Williams' real life, starts with a genealogical treeful of romantics, adventurers and notables: Poet Sidney Lanier, some Tennessee Indian fighters, an early U.S. Senator, and, way back, a brother of St. Francis Xavier. More prosaically, his father was a salesman for International Shoe Co. "C.C." (for Cornelius Coffin) Williams was a gruff, aggressive man with a booming voice who was happiest, says Tennessee, "playing poker with men and drinking." His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, was petite, vivacious, genteel and prim; she nourished rather illusory memories of a grand and gracious Southern past, of going to dances...
Williams worked at that time in a kind of basement garret with Clark Mills, a fellow poet. Mills introduced him to a one-foot shelf of influences: Rimbaud, Rilke, Lorca, Chekhov, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Hart Crane, who became Williams' poetic idol. Tom introduced Mills to Rose. As Mills recalls it, Mrs. Williams "commanded Tom to bring home 'gentleman callers,' " as Tom Wingfield does in Menagerie; "Williams' poor sister was dressed in old-fashioned Southern costumes. She was very lovely. She never talked at all. Mrs. Williams never stopped talking-empty verbiage about their status...
Poetry is not, unfortunately, what most poets are writing in English today. In the last 20 years, the English-speaking world has produced no major poet and scarcely a score of those minor bards who assiduously tune the lyre of language till another great man is ready to take it up. But if quality is lacking, quantity is not. In the 16 years since World War II, more poems have been composed in the U.S.-last year more than 200,000 were submitted for publication-than were written in ten centuries between Beowulf and the Bomb; and in Britain, poetic...