Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have once resided in Venice, the site of several plays. An able soldier, our earl would also be the nephew of a pioneer in the form of sonnet we now call Shakespearean; another uncle translated Ovid's Metamorphoses, the source of much Shakespearean allusion. He would be hailed as poet and playwright and become patron of an acting troupe. Finally, what if our nobleman had on his crest a lion that holds out a paw and, ah yes, shakes a spear...
...juvenilia, but there is neither spark nor promise to the lines, too full of alliteration, all too devoid of depth. "Fram'd in the front of forlorn hope past all recovery,/I stayless stand, to abide the shock of shame and infamy..." The praise Oxford received as a poet may simply have issued from the mouths of sycophants hungry for patronage. Says Alan H. Nelson, a University of California professor who is writing books about Shakespeare and De Vere: "The Earl of Oxford was perhaps the most egotistical and self-serving person of his day in England. It would have...
...life (he died in 1997) suggested Buddhist serenity, Podhoretz remembers him as "arrogant and brash and full of an in-your-face bravado," even a kind of fury. Ginsberg seemed to have a fixation on Podhoretz--possibly because he suspected that Podhoretz had his number as a personality-poet camouflaging mediocrity with an outrageous epater-le-bourgeois program (insanity is sanity; drugs are sacramental; homosexuality is holy; normality is horror). Podhoretz considered Ginsberg's doctrine to be destructive antinomian nonsense, a species of fraud. He even entertained, but rejected, the idea that Ginsberg might have "willed himself" into homosexuality...
Really, really, I recommend that you read Mr. Zbigniew Herbert. He is a serious poet, full of beauty that does not insult our modern post-atrocity sensibilities. A Polish poet born in 1950 who was active in his country's anti-Communist movement, Herbert died in 1998, leaving behind an oeuvre that begins with spare poems about creation, antiquity and art. He then continues those themes through increasingly pointed and readable poetry while also developing a strong form of the prose poem that mixes fairy tales, images from everyday life and an aphoristic style. The recently published posthumous collection Elegy...
This dignified poetry avoids personal topicsand instead speaks to the "you" and the "we," asif the poet effaced himself in order to write foreveryone, a symptom of Herbert's interest inpolitics. Yet it does possess a strong strain ofhumor, even if it's found mainly on the backsidesof more depressing themes. In "What Our Dead Do,"Herbert hazards that the dead "hunt for jobs /whisper the numbers of lottery tickets," thensomberly notes that we imagine them "snug as theburrow of a mouse." Surely that comparison makesthe daily grind of errands and ambition seem likedeath. In one of his most priceless...