Word: poetics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Half a century ago, when frail, poetic Edward MacDowell was No. 1 U. S. composer, the models for high-brow music were Brahms, Grieg, Wagner. Just before World War I, Kulturbolschewiks Arnold Schonberg and Igor Stravinsky (TIME, March 11) led a revolution against musical romanticism. When the revolution was over, U. S. composers still found themselves writing European music. Such U. S. composers as Aaron Copland and John Alden Carpenter tried to go native by using jazz tunes, but only the tunes were American. The musical grammar and syn tax still sounded like Brahms or Stravinsky. Today there is still...
Though California knew the Okies well, most of the U. S. heard little of them until the book and movie of The Grapes of Wrath fixed a picture of them in the public mind. It was a powerful, melodramatic picture of simple, poetic-speaking, well-meaning, violent people, relentlessly harried by hard times, whose efforts to organize were smashed by vigilantes, whose will was not broken although all society was against them, all growers their mortal enemies...
Today Wang Ching-wei is handsome, poetic, sentimental. He is weak-willed and weak-bodied (diabetic, among other things). His personal magnetism is terrific. He can stand for hours on a speaking platform, his fists clenched, denouncing, weeping, pleading, laughing-and sweeping before him the most hostile listeners. Terrified for his life, he even mistrusts foreign correspondents, who must be frisked before he will see them. He is a lyric poet, and writes with an exquisite hand-a great accomplishment in classical China. Since he is the only really big Chinese to favor their cause, the Japanese prize him like...
...which Irishmen had fled to the U. S. in the times of Cromwell and William of Orange, not the same island whose people fled to the U. S. during the potato famines of a century ago. Meanwhile, it had had a cultural renaissance. Irishmen had begun again to take poetic pride in their land, with its purple mountains, its lakes and glens peopled with green-coated, leather-aproned leprechauns, the heather-crowned hills of Donegal, the rocky outlines of the Aran Islands. Their poetry that always symbolized Ireland as a woman beautiful and bereaved was brought back to life...
...dramatized, the arch-esthete contemporaries he cultivated and admired-Painter Jimmie Whistler, who hammered home the theory that art has no morals and trained Wilde in the most cynical wit of the century; Ernest Dowson, hashish-smoking, tuberculous poet who died young in the gutter after writing Cynara, a poetic rosary for disillusioned young men; Artist Aubrey Beardsley, spidery, sardonic, tuberculous genius, called "the most monstrous of orchids" by Wilde; French Novelist Huysmans, who carried decadent experiments in subtle sensations as far as they have ever gone; Theophile Gautier, "Holy ghost of the exotic-aesthetic, satanic-mystical school;" Smithers...