Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...XRay. Sir Walter Scott, said Mark Twain, did "more real and lasting harm" with his "sham grandeurs" than "any other individual that ever wrote." Today, few Americans suspect how many thousands of native place names are directly or indirectly Sir Walter's. "Poetic" names built around glen, dale, vale, hurst, mere and burn broke out like a rash in the late 1800s; soon they enclosed many cities "like a ring of outer fortifications," protecting them from such vulgarisms as creek, gap, bottom and bluff. "Even if a city-dweller could escape moving to the suburbs [of Larchmont, Glen Cove...
...studied, worked and learned to carry a sketch pad wherever he went-even when he ventured into Paris' high-kicking night life. Unlike many a French-influenced U.S. painter who works his way toward the abstract, Levi plunged early into abstractions and progressed back toward a sort of poetic realism with surrealist overtones. A slow worker who produces less than a dozen pictures a year, he finally got around to his first one-man Manhattan show just five years ago, when...
...Tennessee, the mountain folk tell tall tales about black nights when witch boys mount the bald eagle's back to glide over jutting stone peaks. "Dark of the Moon" captures the God-fearing earthiness of the hill people, and puts a thoroughly American legend on the stage with poetic artistry, pungent humor, and lusty music straight from the core of native balladry...
...light, and the monster Caliban, that "freckled whelp hag-born." There also the shipwrecked men tediously conspired and caroused. When, at the last - his enemies forgiven, Ariel and Caliban set free - Prospero forswears magic, he seems indeed (as many men have thought) to symbolize Shakespeare himself, breaking his own poetic wand...
...also a less poetic one. In The Tempest, with its wonderful language, words speak louder than actions; not everybody in the Webster production knew how to utter them. Arnold Moss was a sonorous and commanding Prospero, Frances Heflin a sensitive Miranda. But as Ariel, Ballerina Vera Zorina let a good many speeches dwindle, and her grace was cold rather than sunlit. As Caliban, Negro Actor Canada Lee could not (like Shakespeare) make poetry of ugliness. Stressing the rather dull comedy also shattered the mood; the revolving stage was more practical than atmospheric. This generation may never see a livelier Tempest...