Word: poetes
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...Milton is the better poet, Smith contends, because he "places liberty at the center of his vision" (applause from the right), and because he "is explicitly dedicated to positive transformation in all spheres of human activity" (applause from the left). And, for good measure, he is "an indubitably ecological poet" - though this is the only sentence Smith devotes to that subject...
...those glorious long sentences are part of the explanation for the slow decay of Milton's reputation. He's not a poet for the sound-bite century. Consider the famous passage from Paradise Lost, describing Eve in Eden, which is one of the culminating exhibits in Smith's celebration of Milton. The 20-line sentence contains 20 proper names: Enna, Prosperin, Dis, Ceres, Daphne, Orontes, Castalian, Nyseian, Triton, Cham, Ammon, Lybian Jove, Amalthea, Bacchus, Rhea, Abassin, Amara, Ethiop, Nilus, Assyrian. How many people nowadays (even among the exceptionally well-educated readers of TIME) know what all those words mean...
...Milton makes even smart people feel stupid. Not by accident, either. He is probably the most unrelentingly aggressive poet in English. When Samson says, "My heels are fettered, but my fist is free," he displays the best and worst of Milton. The best is Milton's unsurpassed technical command of English: the double contrast of "heels ... fettered" against "fist ... free"; the long vowel in "heels" echoed by "free"; the alliteration of "fettered ... fist ? free"; the combination of all three effects in the verse-ending stressed monosyllable "free," so ironically spoken by a blind slave in chains, but also...
Family, exile, ethnic violence: all have dominated American poet Li-Young Lee's quietly probing, impressionistic poetry since the publication of his first and widely acclaimed volume, Rose, in 1986. Lee's maternal great-grandfather, the would-be dictator Yuan Shikai, was the first President of the Republic of China, while the poet's father briefly served as Mao's personal physician. The family fled the Chinese civil war for Jakarta - where Lee was born in 1957 - and were forced to move again, in 1959, after his father landed in jail during the course of one of Sukarno's anti...
Yale professor and fellow poet Elizabeth Alexander introduced Rich, calling her ground-breaking and a guiding light for poets everywhere...