Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Apart from their rank in the royal household (just above St. James's Palace caretaker) and their pay ($232.80 a year), the most modest thing about Britain's poets laureate has been their state poetry. In the age of the Hollow Man, task-basket verse celebrating a monarch's birthday or the puberty of a prince sounds at best archaic, at worst ludicrous. When, after 37 years as poet laureate, John Masefield died last May, many Britons thought that the job should be abolished. Even London's Times, which occasionally prints official poems, only halfheartedly urged...
Last week Cecil Day-Lewis, 63, a former Oxford professor known to the public as much for his 19 competent whodunits (under his pseudonym, Nicholas Blake) as for his poetry, became Britain's 18th poet laureate. And who knows? The pen of a still vigorous, thoughtful contemporary could turn a new page in Britain's national poetry-or scratch its final, deadening quatrain. The rangy, resonant-voiced Day-Lewis (who has only lately begun hyphenating his two surnames), seemed determined to broaden the scope of his office...
Abstract & Concrete. Gilmore be gan his law career late. He went to Boston Latin and to Yale (where he was a junior Phi Beta Kappa), got a doctorate in Romance languages after writing a dissertation on the 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé that is still quoted by scholars. He became a teacher almost inevitably. "If one takes Romance languages, one teaches," he says. But after four years, "I couldn't stand it any longer." At 29, he went into law "because it seemed an available thing. Soon, however, I began to find it challenging...
...Grant is a master of the Socratic method, superb in dialogue." He characteristically makes a point by bashing down his glasses so hard that they sometimes break. There is some disagreement about his low, deep voice; Kurland says it has the "sort of cadence and vibrancy of a Welsh poet." Students call Gilmore "the Grunt" because of his habit of harrumphing, and talking into his mustache. One wisecracks that "it's been claimed that he only educates 25% of his students; the rest can't hear...
...person, Folk Singer-Poet Bob Dylan spoke for an age. Over the roaring roll of his guitar, he rasped out sarcastic, sardonic cries of anger, anxiety and alienation that made the young generation wince with the pleasure of recognition. In seclusion in Woodstock, N.Y., since a motorcycle spill in the summer of 1966, he became a legend. Folkniks trembled at rumors. Was he dead, dying, mindless, voiceless? To one of the few reporters who breached his fortress, Dylan laughingly replied: "They're all true." Meanwhile, Dylan in absentia loomed larger than Dylan in the flesh; last year four...