Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bulk of his book: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa and Beckett. This grouping, Bloom's elite among the elite, holds few surprises: an obligatory academic obscurity (Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa), four women and a majority of D.W.E.M.s. (Bloom gives canonical status to Homer and the major Greek dramatists and philosophers but does not discuss their works at any length because his interests focus on authors who came later. A line must be drawn somewhere, but leaving...
Consider the achievements since 1993 alone, when Bill Clinton invited Maya Angelou to be the first poet since Robert Frost to read an original work at a presidential Inauguration. George C. Wolfe won a Tony Award for his direction of Angels in America. Novelist Toni Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Rita Dove was appointed the country's first black poet laureate. Two works inspired by the Rodney King affair -- 56 Blows, a symphony by Alvin Singleton, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a one- woman docudrama by playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith...
...Darius James (Negrophobia: An Urban Parable), dissect racial stereotypes, while those like choreographer Ralph Lemon and sculptor Martin Puryear reflect no identifiable racial content at all. Rita Dove summarizes the trend best when she says: "There are times when I am a black woman who happens to be a poet and times when I am a poet who happens to be black. There are also times when I am more conscious of being a mother or a member of my generation. It's so hopelessly confused that I don't make a big deal...
MUSIC Composer Anthony Davis comes from a talented family: his brother Christopher is a gifted actor and his cousin Thulani an accomplished poet. Davis recalls that at Yale he encountered an essay by Nietzsche extolling opera as a reflection of a people's cultural identity. "I thought that a truly American opera would be based on African-American music," says Davis. That is precisely what he accomplished in his powerful and biting 1984 work X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (with libretto by cousin Thulani), a fierce, modernist, free-tonal piece that employs elements of jazz, blues...
Last October, time senior correspondent Jack White noted that in the same week, one African-American author, Toni Morrison, won the Nobel Prize for Literature while another, Poet Laureate Rita Dove, read her work at the White House. Not long thereafter, another black poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, won the Pulitzer Prize. White began to wonder whether these events and the increasing prominence of other African-American authors signaled a black literary efflorescence...