Word: poetic
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...grand prize for him, and he soon had all the publicity and bookings a young art ist needs. As this release shows, he has all the more fundamental qualities a young artist needs too: exuberant virtuosity, a formidable command of pianistic sonorities and lots of sensitive, poetic feeling. -Christopher Porterfield
...theory of natural selection, just as there will always be a shadowy web surrounding the real Charles Darwin," writes Eiseley. But as anyone who reads his book will realize, Eiseley has come closer than anyone else to solving that mystery and breaking that web. In graceful, occasionally poetic prose, he shows how Darwin, who was initially timid about advancing his theory, was almost beaten into print by Alfred Russel Wallace, a younger, all but unknown researcher. After discussion, the two agreed to announce their theory simultaneously. Eiseley also outlines Darwin's relationship with Charles Lyell, whose research established modern...
This patient construction, this sense of the intrinsic worth of seeing, combines with Chardin's second gift: his remarkable feeling for the poetic (rather than didactic) moments of human gesture. It permeates his genre scenes and portraits, especially the portraits of children; the gentle muteness that Diderot perceived often turns into a noble ineloquence, as though Piero della Francesca were visiting the nursery. In some way Chardin's absorption in the act of painting paralleled the absorption of children in their games, which he painted. One has only to look at the figure in his portrait Little Girl...
That, alas, is precisely the problem. Now roughly a century after that flight of poetic fancy, clover and, indeed, a host of other crops have been laced with a chemical pesticide that may threaten the blissful honeybee with extinction. The culprit is methyl parathion, which has been used to combat pests like the boll weevil, scourge of the cotton fields. But methyl parathion is highly dangerous stuff. Only a dab will penetrate the skin, attack the nervous system and kill humans as well as insects...
What was Harvard defending? The question needs to be asked in each generation. What were valuable truths then and now? In retrospect, truth emerged for me as much from poetic passion as from the disciplined play of science. John Finley became the sulking Achilles and wily Odysseus on the state of Sanders Theatre while Anna Freud Coolly described our unconscious lust on the third floor of Emerson Hall. Archibald MacLeish, zen-like, trying to "know" an apple balanced James Watson's discovery of the double helix. Clyde Kluckholn's exploration of Navaho culture and psyche challenged Wassily Leontieff's analysis...