Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...conservative. She laments the narrowing shelter of Miss Dickinson's friends and points out her great art in "presenting movement." For the author of "Leaves of Grass" she has no superlative praise, but commenting on his writing she declares it is poetry "because he approaches his subject from the poetic point of view." Then comes this significant addition, "what makes a literary work prose or poetry . . . is a matter of approach and of return. By return I mean some device by which a poem is brought continually back to its starting-place--something which keeps the basic emotional symbol constantly...
...call this process debasing or to talk about it as the product of the machine age is merely unhumorous and professorial. The Saturday Evening Post, the radio, the moving picture do not constitute, except by a poetic extension of the term, our 'national culture.' Our national culture, like that of every other country, is composed of the best artistic writing we produce, the best sculpture, music, etc. The rest is not 'debased art' at all: it is vulgar entertainment for the great majority who have a natural (and therefore perfectly sensible) desire to be entertained vulgarly...
...placed firmly on the top of another. It cannot be placed on probation, because one small laugh would bring down the house. From the moment when it enters the kiln as an amorphous piece of clay with possibilities, a brick is doomed to be fired. It is thus poetic justice that decrees that its career should be ended by a process known as "burning under...