Word: poeticizes
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...Never apologize/ For what you anthologize." So, if anyone had thought of it, might run the motto for this entertaining and occasionally exasperating selection of poetic japes and fripperies. Novelist Kingsley Amis is not just a wickedly funny writer (read Lucky Jim several times); he is also a critic known for his strong and aggressively idiosyncratic opinions. With the venerable Oxford imprimatur on his side, Amis' poetastering now becomes what the next several generations of readers will have to swallow...
...avoids romanticizing them with a league-of-gentlemen myth. Mostly, the sources of his book are an unsavory lot, greedy and loutish. One, however, had a taste for Flaubert and Wittgenstein, another the skill and nerve to become a professional racing-car driver, and a third possessed a spontaneously poetic soul. He greeted the dawn after the successful holdup with lines from Omar Khayyám: "Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night/ Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight...
...actors to gloss over nuance with passion, tenderness with violence. Unfortunately, this attempt to tone down the obscure philosophy fails to solve the problems in the play. The members of the audience leave with befuddled expressions on their faces, feeling like they've just been bludgeoned by the Poetic and Profound and that they should probably spend the rest of the evening trying to figure it all out. They also feel somewhat cheated on entertainment...
...most Proustian of painters. His truer literary equivalent, though, was the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The blank page, for Mallarmé, trembled with possibility, as calm water or the tight-stretched canvas did for Monet. Its white flatness was not an absence: it was a poetic element, possessing the character of thought. "The intellectual armature of the poem," Mallarmé once wrote, "conceals itself, is present-is active-in the space that surrounds the stanzas and in the white of the paper: a meaningful silence, no less wonderful to compose than the lines themselves." And again...
...triple play, then I go ahead at bat and hit a homer. All these fantasies, based on the true glory of base ball! And why? Because a major league player has to be special; he must have a certain lyrical quickness and luck that belong more to the poetic than to the athletic part of life. Baseball is nearer to art because of the expert solitude of the player...