Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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MacLeish's writing runs the gamut from the loftiest poetic imagery to colloquial vulgarisms. And he makes use of an effective gimmick for underscoring certain crucial lines by employing a celestial prompter over a loudspeaker, whose words are then delivered by the actor on stage; it brings to mind the old French dictum, "Un beau vers on peut entendre deux fois...
...threw it back at them. French Novelist Romain Gary, who wrote one of the best and most serious novels of 1958 in The Roots of Heaven, has turned out what is bound to be one of the most urbanely amusing novels of 1959. The Roots of Heaven was a poetic last stand in the name of freedom. Lady L. is for freedom, too-freedom from people who are so grimly determined to make men free that they lose sight of humanity and become petty tyrants themselves...
Like the rat in his incantatory verse, Theodore Roethke writes poetry in which the meaning is just beneath the surface, with only the end of its nose showing. Perhaps the best of the U.S. poetic generation that is wedged between the spare witticisms of Wallace Stevens and the distempered howls of Allen Ginsberg's Beat Generation, 50-year-old Poet Roethke has restored simplicity to the tortured, packed lines of U.S. moderns. He has brought back melody to a poetry that was becoming as labored and dissonant as the twelve-tone scale...
...lies on the ground crying out why, the problem arises of giving utterance the effect of action. J.B.'s plight smacks, in dramatic terms, of the kind of situation-"in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done"-that Matthew Arnold held ill-fitted for poetic narrative...
...though last year that MacLeish's abbreviated line form would sound too much like a staccato chant on stage got our preconceptions singed. Here is a playwright who is not afraid of beautiful literate language, and none too soon. He has rejuvenated the anemic field of Poetic Drama Since Shakespeare. J.B.'s quality of language and quality of thought make it one of the few plays worth paying Broadway's orchestra-seat ransoms...