Word: poetic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bound by that stern poetic creed, Louisiana Story traces a symbolic story. The wallowing amphibious machines of an oil company invade the idyllic peace of a Louisiana bayou. Flaherty juxtaposes a tense chase sequence-alligator v. coon in the swamp water-and the tumultuous pursuit of oil by the monster, man-made drilling derricks which can plunge pipes 14,000 feet into the earth. Throughout this blending of themes, the bonds of humanity between oil riggers and a Cajun boy illumine the recurrent thesis of Flaherty's works: "Mankind is one community...
...that survival has been in doubt-and plenty of literary buzzards have circled above the place of apparent extinction. Archibald MacLeish, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a strong and gorgeous narrative poem on the conquest of Mexico (Conquistador), began, in the middle '30s, to write poetic manifestoes of state in which the oratorical interest outgrew the poetic. Moreover, both kinds of interest deteriorated, reaching a nadir in a thin book of thin versified prattle called America Was Promises, in 1939. In that year MacLeish had accepted the first of a series of public offices: that...
MacLeish's job with UNESCO ended last year and he retired, at 55, to the life of "a private citizen and a practicing poet." The results, so far as verse is concerned, are certainly minor, still echoing the big, pretentiously philosophical tones for which his poetic equipment is essentially unsuited, but here & there MacLeish is at home again with the private emotions that he can make ring true. Chief among such emotions is something that some synthetically tough "intellectuals" have decried as nostalgia, as if the muses were not forever daughters of memory, or as if there were something...
Brooke enjoyed his short life too much to bear down often with sustained intensity on any writing, artistic or critical. Poverty and illness and ambition drove his poetic progenitor John Keats; but early success, doting friends and romantic passions distracted Brooke. He was almost at his best in his letters. From a Munich boardinghouse he described a "monstrous, tired-faced, screeching, pouchy creature, of infinite age and horror, who screams opposite me at dinner and talks with great crags of food projecting from her mouth." Musing on Niagara Falls, Poet Brooke wrote: "The river, with its multitudinous waves...
...brought a strange, yet significant, heritage to his work. His father was Colonel Jacob Wark ("Roaring Jake") Griffith, a Confederate cavalry officer given to florid readings of Shakespeare. Like him, young D. W. had a stentorian voice, a tough physical frame, and a character that mixed moral austerity with poetic sentiment. He absorbed the attitude of the post-bellum Southerner to the Nouhern carpetbagger and the problems of the new freed men. When his talents and his viewpoint merged in The Birth of a Nation, a story of the Civil War, the Reconstruction and the first Ku Klux Klan...