Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...death to mock a poet, Death to be a poet, Death to love a poet...
Loving Patina. Since the making and collecting of statuettes was the custom in ancient Rome, it was inevitable that the men of the Renaissance should revive it. They read of superb little sculptures like the Hercules that the poet Statius insisted Hannibal had admired and that Sulla used for adorning his banquet table. Fifteenth century connoisseurs not only collected ancient statuettes but also began commissioning contemporary ones...
Totville, 1961. The Christmastide verse for the young is clean and scientific, but lacks the old-fashioned zing of the real thing. Poet Muriel Rukeyser's I Go Out (Harper; $2.95) makes a sort of go at it in verse about a day in the life of a city child...
There are exceptions. The Fox, illustrated by Peter Spier (Doubleday; $2.95), has delicate, colored pen drawings, and the text, an old song, is good enough to sing. Mary Britton Miller's Listen-the Birds, illustrated by Evaline Ness (Pantheon; $3), achieves unpatronizing verse. The poet knows enough about chickadees to know they actually say chicka-dee-dee-dee, but the child who hopes to see live birds like the ones illustrated will be sadly deceived. James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl (Knopf; $3.95), has illustrations in good old-fashioned pen and ink, though the subject matter...
...Status Symbol. The child classics run from Dean Swift to Tom Swift, from Defoe and his immortal castaway to Mark Twain's raft, adrift forever on the Mississippi. Alice is still in Wonderland, and the Ancient Mariner is there to remind the buyer that man was a poet before he learned prose and that a child who is fobbed off with baby-talk doggerel is not only being robbed but nudged into the cozy horrors of the remedial-reading set. Treasure Island and The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle may still be bought, and it is a good thing...