Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ENDERBY, by Anthony Burgess. A jaunty account of the taming of a poet, demonstrating with scurrilous charm that an artist is a man who expresses for all men their unbuttoned true selves...
Scurrilous Charm. Author Burgess is sounding again an ancient warning of his trade: that the poet's natural enemies remain varied and dangerous. The hostile forces manifest themselves as rich but tasteless patrons, pop singers, and even other poets, one of whom steals the Minotaur theme and turns it into a screenplay for Son of the Beast from Outer Space...
...poet, Burgess also warns, is a dangerous man-one of life's great survivors. In the wildly freewheeling last half of the novel, Enderby returns to claim his old poet's self. On the lam from all his would-be reformers-including the police-he ends up in the layatories of Morocco, blissfully scribbling a long poem based on Hamlet. Enderby may not have the gift for living, but, concludes Burgess, "poets, even minor ones, donate the right words" that enable others to live. On this claim-that they are saviors who cannot save themselves-Burgess rests...
...even here, as in the memorable title piece of his previous book of stories, Among the Dangs (1961), he insists on the moral. The sci-fi gimmicks of his fantasy worlds point metaphorically back to the truths of the real world. Into the Cone of Cold is typical: a poet allows himself to be frozen and thawed out again in a scientific experiment; beyond the spooky suspense of the situation, the cone of cold comes to stand for a state of spiritual exile from which the poet must grope back to an altered life...
...settled on the point first, then invented a story to illustrate it. When this happens, a deadening air of calculation clouds his writing. It is almost as if his critical faculty overwhelmed his creative instinct, for Elliott, at 49, is not only a novelist (In the World) and poet (From the Berkeley Hills) but also a provocative essayist on social and literary issues (A Piece of Lettuce...