Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...British-boy-meets-American-girl story is told with winning charm. David Niven is the British airman who finds himself falling in a burning plane. By radio, he shouts amorous-poetic speeches (he is certain they are his dying words) to a pretty WAC (Kim Hunter) on the landing field. Then he jumps-without parachute. Incredibly, he picks himself up uninjured except for a peculiar crack on the head that makes him imagine he is a fugitive from heaven. Throughout the film, the camera moves between a clinical study of lovesick Niven's brain disorder and the imaginary heaven...
William Morris' verse translation (1887) of the Odyssey came nearest to doing it poetic justice in modern English.* Well-known prose translators-Samuel Butler, S. K. Butcher, T. E. Lawrence-have put it into their own idioms, neither Homer's nor that of poetry. E. V. Rieu's is the best of the more modest prose translations intended as transparencies, making it easy for the reader to follow the Odyssey as a wondrous novel of adventure...
...instance, poetic justice did not wait for the moderates. One night last week in the Street of the Prophet, a gang of terrorists were literally hoisted on their own petard. Their car, a 1941 Plymouth, swerving under the impact of a British machine-gun burst, hit a traffic island. Then, with door open and amatol mines falling out, it swerved and hit a child, crumpled into a tree, and exploded, blowing the two occupants into tattered shreds. Several houses on both sides of the street collapsed as the mines went off. All that remained of one Arab-style villa...
Thomas' poetic ancestors include druids, sun worshipers, fertility ritualists, wizards of Welsh folklore, psalmists and hymnists, the Bible. To this complex half-pagan, half-devout inheritance, Thomas has added more up-to-date influences-the intense experience of his boyhood in the Welsh countryside, his passionate faith in the Freudian conception of life as a struggle between the desire to procreate and the desire to find oblivious peace in death. Wholly absent from his poems are humor and political ideology: he reduces his rich and strange harvest of influences and beliefs simply to a "record of my individual struggle...
...Albie's poetic justice came in 1931, when both he and Barry captained their respective eleven's. Harvard marched into the Stadium with an unbeaten record, took the Elis' opening kickoff back to the Bulldog seven yard-line, but failed to score. The grueling contest which followed was decided late in the game when Booth place-kicked a field goal that gave Yale a 3 to 0 victory...