Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Waste Land was not mere poetic journalism. Eliot found the world in bits & pieces, reported it in snips & snatches of allusions to the Grail legend, to Frazer's Golden Bough, to Hindu philosophy. At the end, he says: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." The shoring was not shoveling; it was the orderly construction of a mosaic. His purpose was not merely to describe disorder and frustration, but to contrast it with the possibility of a return to order and fulfillment...
...circumstance that led his early biographers to consider him hardhearted. Mary Meredith wandered from place to place, unhappy and alone; her husband was relentless until just before her death, when he allowed their son to visit her. Out of the tragedy of their life, Meredith fashioned the stylized poetic sequence, Modern Love, fifty 16-line sonnets of what Sassoon calls "highly perfected workmanship, constructed as a finely woven monodrama, and abounding in memorable passages and variety of mood." Poet Sassoon had thought that it must have taken him at least three years to finish the work; to his astonishment...
...Pound wrote behind U.S. barbed wire have since become known as the "Pisan Cantos" and bring up the rear of his life work, The Cantos. The Cantos, now totaling 84, are a chaotic grab-bag in which the reader can find whatever he wishes, for Pound is both a poetic genius whose work influenced Eliot, Joyce and Yeats, and an intellectual crank who toadied to political cutthroats...
Freedom & Fog Ghosts. Windom is sentimental, liberal, vague in his speech, tremendously learned in American history. He has lived through the administrations of 14 Presidents, and has shaken hands with nine of them. He holds long, philosophic-poetic conversations with his granddaughter-in-law-his grandson is a flyer-in a language which, with its mixture of slang and Walt Whitman grandiloquence, is unlike anything in American life or literature...
...attempt to fulfill the epic sweep that Remembrance Rock fails. To a considerable extent it fails because of it -the grandiloquent language, the heroic characters, the poetic prose that on re-examination turns out to be well-nigh meaningless. Its failure is so complete in this respect that it may be that Sandburg's greatest service to American literature will be to have ended this sort of imaginative effort-"the great American novel"-once...