Word: poeticizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...respect, at least, both Lou Reed and Patti Smith represent a single tradition in popular music-that of the talking singer. Both like to patter over a light drum beat or bass line, in the manner of a Jim Morrison. For Smith this practice masquerades as high poetic art; for Reed it seems to be more a product of his declining vocal resources. His last album, Take No Prisoners-a live, double-record set-consisted mostly of Reed chattering with and occasionally insulting his audiences...
...Agenin project modern, realistic feeling at the expense of classical eloquence. During his tirades against mankind, Beaulieu runs through the Alexandrines and casts caesuras to the winds. But he builds sympathy by the low-key, unstylized way he plays the love scenes. Agenin, too, is better at intimacy than poetic elegance. She is a wonder, though, at dispensing petits fours and nasty court gossip to a fine pair of dandies whose wigs make them resemble Bert Lahr playing the Cowardly Lion. When she leans back and says lovingly to poor, scoldy Alceste, "How boring you are!" while deliciously wriggling...