Word: poeticize
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...irregularly squirming brightnesses: elsewhere lives black silence filled with perpetual falling of invisible snow. . Through the dance of Heavenly Longing, when little Eva dies, and the dance of The Rival Bidders, when Tom is sold to the ''bloodily luminous'' Legree, the movement of the poetic ballet is increasingly accelerated until Tom joins Eva in the dance of The Eternal Peace, "weightlessly uplifted within textures beneath knowledge. "Legree disappears, trumpets sound and Tom is carried away by an angel: blackness vanishes. Appeartwo mighty golden doors upon which blazes LIGHT outward goldenly slowly the huge doors open-revealing...
...austere epitaphs of Spoon River were more than an expression of honest and fruitful defiance. They seemed to prove that the common stuff of U. S. backyard existence, the daily labors, the aspirations, even the graceless material of small-town gossip and slander, could be woven into a poetic pattern that need not lack dignity and significance...
Last week, with a new volume of verse and a biography of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters gave further evidence of the unevenness of his poetic gift and of his fierce resentment at the low estate of poets in contemporary U. S. society. The 38 poems in Invisible Landscapes, ranging from patriotic pieces like Give Us Back Our Country, to the obscure, arid, rambling speculations of Hymn to the Earth, are far below the level of Spoon River...
...biography of Lindsay, aside from its value as a study in poetic frustration, throws a vivid light on the quality of the culture that nourished the poets of the Midwest school. Containing a great store of unassimilated information, lighted by occasional clairvoyant insights, the book seems less revealing of Lindsay than of Masters...
...Born of deeply religious parents in 1879, Lindsay showed a precocious gift for words, for sensitive, original observation. He also revealed an emotional and intellectual instability that became more apparent as he grew older. He attended Hiram College, a Campbellite institution, kept detailed diaries in which he developed grandiose poetic projects, studied the Bible and Poe, aspired to be both a major prophet and an independent thinker. Half-starved while attending an art institute in Chicago, he fled to New York, where he peddled his poems on the street at 2? apiece. Lonely, celibate, driven by feverish ambition, he tramped...