Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Godwin (Catharine Gibson). Even when he receives the news of his first wife's suicide, the accidental rhyme "found drowned" in the letter affects him more than his loss. Byron taunts him, "You shred and tear lives around you as much as I, the cynic, the libertine." The older poet admits to his share of irresponsibility, leaving a child by Claire Clairemont (Kate Bennis) to die in a convent...
...much of its natural energy. The play's biggest disappointment is his portrayal of Lord Byron. Shea's Bysshe quivers in his presence like a nervous schoolboy, but Byron as Rigby plays him doesn't seem to merit this idolatry. He appears middle-aged and harmless, although the poet was only 28 at the time. It is hard to imagine him climbing drainpipes after rich young heiresses and sleeping his way across Europe...
Without Bryon providing a strong focal point, the central relationship between the two poets fails to engage the audience. The sexual tension between the two men suggested by the text is missing, as is a sense of development in their friendship, so that the older poet seems unaffected by Bysshe's drowning at the end. Rigby choses to deliver Byron's final lines over his friend's body in a defeated murmur instead of in the desperate shout called for by the script. Although this interpretation is consistent with his overall performance, it mutes the power of the scene...
...evening was divided into two acts, the first featuring works by Tsvetaeva and the second featuring works by Akhmatova. The otherwise random selections of the poems related to periods in the poet's lives, rather than to periods in their literary development. Before each reading, Bloom would provide some historical context, explaining connections between events in the poet's lives and the poems. This information gave a certain degree of coherence to the evening. More importantly, it added a personal dimension to the words of the poets, tying the emotions evoked to the physical reality behind them. The specific events...
...heart, Anna Christie is about parents and children. O'Neill's actor father James died a few months before the play was written, and in it you can see Eugene -- the tramp poet in a fog, the son who ran away to sea -- raging at a dying generation's prejudices before reconciling himself to the people who hold them. In a subtler way, Richardson has donned the mantle of her incandescent mother, Vanessa Redgrave. By evening's end, the young star has settled onto the old O'Neill sofa. Why, they might have been made for each other...