Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...this project. There is the excellent Amy Lowell collection of first editions and manuscripts. But these are behind glass or within a steel vault, and therefore, beyond the reach of the casual reader. The Henry Wadsworth Long-fellow library of American poetry consists of all the debris of Victorian poetic effort. Of the modern poetic output on the shelves, whatever is worth reading is so hidden in the mass of exercises in versification, that it evades all discovery. Beyond this there are also two sets of the novels of Scott, five lives of Nelson, a four volume life of Napoleon...
...whom most of his fellow poets do not regard as a poet at all. Typical modern U.S. poetry does not sell for a good reason: misnamed "lyric," it is actually introspective, exhibitionist, an effort on the poet's part to escape from intellectual nightmare. Witter Bynner's poetic cosmos is top-heavy with intellect but more objective than most; he does not get hysterical about it. His poems are not great but they are masculine. At 34 he summed up, in The New World, what he thought about Life; at 50 he has written the sequel. Eden Tree...
Next day's Parsifal was orchestrally poignant, lyric. Slower than most was Toscanini's tender reading. A magnificent Gurnemanz (Basso Ivar Andresen of the Metropolitan), a poetic Parsifal (Tenor Fritz Wolff), a comely but vocally insecure Kundry (Soprano Elisabeth Ohms), sang their way through Wagner's leisurely, sometimes philosophically turbid drama. The sets "dated from 1882 and looked...
...life William Wordsworth touches only at rare intervals that higher inconsistency which is popularly conceded to poets. The conventionality of his prosaic life is as unconventional as "poetic rapture" would be in the pecadilloes of George Babbitt. In an attempt of fit Wordsworth into the poetic niche of the normally abnormal. Professor Read finds in the key to the true Wordsworth, the well of his poetic emotion. Professor Herford, on the other hand, looks upon the life of the poet with the cold, green eye of pedantic scholarship. He manages to maintain his equilibrium as far as Wordsworth...
Behind this mask, Mr. Read finds to his almost gleeful surprise, a suppressed soul. So long as his love for Annette burned in his spirit, he could write such great poems as "Tintern Abbey". But the fog of British respectability soon clouded this source of poetic feeling, and after ten short years the fire went out for lack of fuel and encouragement. After that there is nothing. As long as Annette lived he was that poet of "reality" but one his love for her died he saw things only through the smoked glasses of conventionality. From that time...