Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...often been remarked by men of letters that a cold and wintry clime tends to discourage the poetic spirit, and that many a melodious bard in embryo has been frozen to an early silence by inclement weather. Shelley, Keats, and Byron, they say, flew like birds from foggy England to a land where pomegranates bloom at Christmas, and so must all young men who seek the favor of the Muses. Be this as it may, however, it is an undoubted and indisputable fact that the lines proudly gleaming in print below were inspired by the pedestrial slushiness Cambridge has suffered...
...struggle to find some essence in man and his universe beyond its tragic appearance: that naturalistic appearance which is the core of "The Moon in the Caribees" and "Desire Under the Eims." We may call it a cosmic yearning for a God of eternal meaning, but this philosophical and poetic urge has seemed always to be only half in earnest, at once passionately sought for and scornfully east aside. In "Strange Interlude" there are poetic outbursts from Nina identifying God with herself as an all-compassionate Mother, and men as flashes in the electrical display of God. In "Mourning Becomes...
...such an emotion this expression seems most inadequate. One is tempted to say that a dramatic or narrative form of poetry would be far better. But O'Neill has previously expressed the thoughts and feelings of his characters in a poetic prose that sounded their depths. There is only one moment, the last scene in the play, which approaches a full poetic expression of what the dramatist means. Both dramatically and poetically "Days Without End" seems to be peculiarly deficient in communication...
...three days, Prince Sirki takes Grazia with him, wrapped in his cloak. The impossibility of assaying the philosophic content, if any, of the play by Alberto Casella from which this picture was adapted does not diminish the charm of Death Takes a Holiday. It remains a serious poetic riddle, imperfect, thoughtful, delicately morbid...
Among the lost arts is that of writing verse in "heroic couplets." Though the 18th Century thought it the only wear for poets, it has since dropped completely out of fashion, is now never used as a serious poetic form. For the English, especially, it still has a half-humorous academic charm. Author Laver, onetime winner of Oxford's Newdigate Poetry Prize, comports himself with fair grace in these borrowed 18th Century garments but never rises to the level of Pope's elegance or acid...