Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with his second novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, and was going strong half a century later. His last / book, a volume of poems titled Winter Words, appeared in 1928, shortly after his death at 87. In his introduction to Winter Words, Hardy crowed that he was the "only English poet who has brought out a new volume of his verse" at so advanced...
...pleasure when Seymour-Smith leaves off squabbling to examine Hardy's verse. Of course, the poems are full of squabbling too, but mostly it's the poet arguing with himself. Seymour-Smith does an admirable job of promoting Hardy's poetry above all else -- above the television adaptations, the novels that inspired them and all the unsubstantiated but unshakable rumors about the writer's romantic pursuits. (he was -- take your pick -- impotent, licentiously heterosexual or repressedly homosexual.) Hardy's life makes clear that his poetry was paramount. He trained initially as an architect, abandoned that profession for novel writing, then...
Unfortunately, Seymour-Smith treats the poems as interesting chiefly for their personal revelations. He scants the trait that more than anything else defines Hardy as a poet: his structural inventiveness. The former architect retained a love of building. A recent study of Hardy estimates that he composed in more than 790 metrical forms. (A comparison with two other poets celebrated for their versatility is instructive: Swinburne wrote in about 420 forms; Browning in 200.) There's a great irony in this statistic. The most formally restless of English poets was, in his daily life, one of the most rooted...
This restlessness saves Hardy the poet from his obsessions -- you might even say his monomania. His singular stanzaic shapes, his deliberately bumpy meters, his weird triple rhymes (frowardly/untowardly) all enliven and diversify his subject matter, which otherwise would be claustrophobically narrow. The number of his poems that concern romantic triangles, with, typically, one of the three parties represented by a ghost, must surely run into the hundreds...
...poet Neil Young finally was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame today, along with Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa. Young's most recent album was last year's "Sleeps With Angels."Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved...