Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...those "wine-dark seas" and "rosy-fingered dawns"--were actually stock formulas allowing the bard to fill out his line of verse and get on with the story. The pressure on these performers, composing while they spoke or sang, must have been intense. Seen in this light, the poet's invocations to the Muse for inspiration at the beginning of the Iliad and the Odyssey have a dimension beyond the religious; these pleas could also represent a nervous bard, faced with a gathering of drowsy aristocrats, saying God help...
...19th century poet and critic Matthew Arnold commended Homer's "speed, directness and simplicity" in the original Greek, and these qualities abound in Fagles' translation. The problems the epic must resolve are quickly set forth. All the surviving Greek heroes from the 10-year siege and ultimate destruction of Troy--the subject matter of the Iliad--have long since returned to their homes except Odysseus, the King of Ithaca. There, 10 years after the fall of Troy, his faithful wife Penelope fends off a riotous band of suitors for her hand in marriage; his son Telemachus, an infant when...
Kramer's approach is not systematic, and the subjects of her six chapters are very specific: a restaurant in a bohemian district of West Berlin, an East German poet who spied on his friends for the secret police, the struggle over what kind of Holocaust memorial--if any--should be built in Berlin. Perhaps the most poignant and telling of the stories is the one about a young man whom Kramer calls Peter Schmidt, a drifting East German who tried to escape when the Wall still existed, was caught and imprisoned but was eventually sold to the West (the East...
...large, enthusiastic crowd greeted the renowned poet Maya Angelou as she gracefully stepped forward to the podium. Standing before a gathering of Democrats at their August convention in Chicago, Angelou put forth ideas applicable to both Republicans and Democrats. In her inimitable river of words, she urged Americans to "discuss the issues that separate us," yet maintain respect for one another "since we are more alike than unalike...
...marriage predictably dissolves within the first twenty pages and Stewart quickly packs off to Senegal compelled by her lifetime obsession that she has always been "meant to exist elsewhere". Her excuse for the trip is dissertation research which requires her to interview and study with a Senegalese poet and activist, Ibrahim Mangane. Mangane, however, is not a purely educational pursuit, but rather an obsession and the embodiment of everything that Stewart wants. Happily married but infamous for his numerous affairs with young women, he is everything but the traditional young, stable and picture perfect...