Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Playwright Robert Anderson explained to a rainy night audience at M.I.T. last Monday evening that artists can and should come to terms with the American theater. Expressing a point of view distant not only in time from the crusading days of his '39 Harvard thesis on future poetic drama in America, he followed a line of compromise. It seemed to him imperative that a playwright accept the theater of his day. An unproduced playwright is no playwright he argued, challenging someone to name a writer "discovered" after his death when his plays never reached an audience during his lifetime...
Poet Donald Hall, 27, has not yet unseated the great oldsters, but with his very first book, he has made a solid seat for himself. Exiles and Marriages has neither the poetic blaze of Dylan Thomas nor the suppressed smolder of Robert Frost, but it has its own true tone composed in almost equal parts of intelligence and imagination. Like most good poets, Hall knows that. Life is hell, but death is worse. And it is possible that even in an age of anxiety he puts on the hair shirt of guilt more often than is strictly necessary ("I wear...
...Poetic Interlingua...
Papa Married a Mormon is a mock bucolic western in the vein of an Agnes de Mille ballet scored for six guns. It is rarely convincing, but frequently amusing, and few readers will want to revoke the "poetic license" Author Fitzgerald claims in salting the tales of his kith and kin. Take his Uncle Will, for instance -that's his gamblin' and killin' uncle. In a 15-hour poker session Uncle Will won the Whitehorse Saloon and helped the former owner forget his troubles by plugging him with his pearl-handled revolver. The Whitehorse was the hottest...
...fiction achieves a higher level. Paul Goodman's play Abraham and Isaac, while it does not deepen or alter our basic understanding of the biblical situation in the fashion of Kierkergaard's Fear and Trembling, does retell the story with poetic insight into the man of faith's process of willing. Also colorful bits of Hebraic philosophy enrich our understanding of the chracters and their outlook on life...