Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...title character as "the eponymous hippopotamus." Shun this pedant, who should consider another line of work. Read the novel, however. Its virtues are cynicism and ill will, directed energetically at all that is trendy and modern, and embodied in the blubbery, whiskified carcass of an out-of-date poet named Ted Wallace...
...then a nonpareil comes along who puts on a good show of inexhaustible radiance. America lost one such rare soul last week when James Merrill died of a heart attack at the age of 68. He was a novelist, an essayist and a playwright, but it's as a poet-the author of 11 volumes of verse, with a 12th forthcoming in March-that he made his ineradicable mark...
...founding partner of Merrill Lynch, an unlikely poet, that's a condition he shared with Wallace Stevens the insurance executive and William Carlos Williams the obstetrician; American poetry has a healthy tradition of culling its favorite sons and daughters from unexpected niches. Merrill attended Amherst College, but his education was interrupted by a year of military service in Europe in 1944. A mere World War, though, and the tumultuous love affairs he also endured, were hardly sufficient to deflect his sense of purpose. Year by year, with ferocious industry, he added to his glittering shelf of books...
...Smith is a sort of poet--a "slam" poet to be exact. Smith has parlayed her form of reviewing, self-promotion and a reliance on politically correct poetic pap into a career of artistic merit, at least according to the Globe's reviewers. And according to the usual litany of minorities that she writes about and uses in her over-blown theatrical "poetic" readings, there's really not that much talent there. But when you espouse sycophantic pieces dealing with Blacks, gays and society's downtrodden, it's not talent that matters--only political and sociological content...
This is not to say that all writers on campus ought to put down their pencils. A would-be poet ought to follow the lead of the would-be cellist. He should take private lessons...