Word: poetic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...easier to understand Lowell's break with strict meter when Hamilton includes an excerpt from his Life Studies and describes the conflict many mid-20th century poets faced. The dissolution of conventional poetic form and style following World War I was perhaps the single greatest phenomenon in modern literature. It posed a critical problem for poets like Lowell: whether to jump into the newly opened vista by discarding form, carrying T.S. Eliot's innovations one more step, or to make poetry more powerful by struggling with a fixed meter. Lowell, who had trained himself to write in regular meter, finally...
...adolescence two strains appeared. Young Lowell abandoned the purely physical world of football and fighting and became a fanatical reader, of Job, of Shakespeare and then of any poetry he could find. He also began to exhibit signs of manic depression. Both aspects showed in his pursuit of a poetic career; in 1937 he journeyed to Vanderbilt University outside Nashville to visit his idol, Allen Tate. He pitched a tent on the poet's lawn for three months...
...makes a good stab, though. Like a student who hasn't done the week's reading but tries to answer a question in section, Axinn grabs onto broad, oft-used poetic ideas--like the wind, or the poet--and tries to surround the images and vignettes in a cloud of meaning. The result is little more than a patch of ground...
...poetic books, chapter after chapter is hacked away. Gone is fully half of the book of Psalms, which might now be better retitled David's Greatest Hits. The prophets are especially victimized. Besides large chunks, telling phrases are lost. Consider the felicitous line from Jeremiah: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt." Snip out the last three words. Or this passage from Isaiah, immortalized in Handel's Messiah: "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities." Away with the second phrase, on grounds of redundancy. So much for poetry...
Yasser Arafat can wax poetic about how much the P.L.O. loves peace. But his followers showed their real values in the bloody way they celebrated their "victory": by firing into the air, killing 17 people and wounding more than...