Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ultra-modernity, super-sophistication and profound obscurity to other publications. John Von Rodenbeck's whimsical study of the victorious Nelson at Trafalgar, Anne Lord's charming sketch of Horses in a Field and Betsy Borden's Elm Tree in Spring demonstrate perhaps most lucidly this admirable use of poetic simplicity...
Perhaps his most effective are the smallest studies, exhibited in portfolio. Here, Rosenborg's poetic musings demonstrate their delicate spontaneity to best advantage, distilling a personal technique to its most concise and meaningful point...
Eliot has always operated on the principle that the critic should erect his personal tastes into law, and in this book he lays down a kind of Justinian Code of poetic greatness. According to Eliot, the greatest poets, and specifically Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, have "Abundance, Amplitude and Unity." By abundance. Eliot means that (unlike T. S. Eliot) "they all wrote a good deal." By amplitude, he means that "each had a very wide range of interest, sympathy and understanding." As for unity, "it is Life itself, the World seen from a particular point of view...
...serenity, stillness, and reconciliation; and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a region where that guide can avail us no farther." Insofar as Eliot has always derived his theories from his practice, this is his ex post facto description of the Four Quartets, a poetic bridge between the realms of the material and the spiritual...
...Paradise Lost and Finnegans Wake: "Two books by great blind musicians, each writing a language of his own based upon English." Only once does he commit one of those calculated critical indiscretions of his Young Turk days when he dubbed Hamlet a "failure." Immersed in recent years in the poetic drama, Eliot permits himself the absurdity of suggesting that the early verse plays of Yeats "are probably more permanent literature than the plays of Shaw...