Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...From Merlin and the Gleam. Tennyson later wrote that "the Gleam . . . signifies . . . the higher poetic imagination...
...Grass Harp--Truman Capote's adaptation of his novel is a sensitive, poetic drama, but still needs a good deal of polishing. At the Colonial...
Truman Capote's stage adaptation of his novel, The Grass Harp, is a curious fusion of poetic sensitivity and imperfect theatrical technique. Clearly, Mr. Capote was hampered at the outset by the limited number of ways in which one can write a play. He had a quixotic plot and a tragic theme to work with, and inexplicably be chose straight comedy for his dramatic medium. Regrettably his continual resort to stock comic artifices detracts greatly from the important thematic development of the play...
...Optimist. Edwin Arlington Robinson was the only sizable poet the U.S. had between Emily Dickinson and the poetic renaissance around World War I sparked by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. Robinson found the poetic landscape "flowing with milk and water." He injected the gall & wormwood of realism. In general, he celebrated the individual, not by tracking the footprints of great men, but by tracing the soul-prints of weak ones. The Miniver Cheevys, the Richard Corys, the fumblers, the failures, the souses were not freaks to him but symbols of man's suffering...
...this O'Neill brought his brooding, unflinching sense of the dark mass of things, but not the art - or even the articulateness-to give it genuine shape. Desire emerges as neither realistic drama nor poetic tragedy, but as something clumsily in between. Most of the writing, in a rather stylized dialect as factitious as it is folksy, lacks reverberation. Hence, too much of the action has the quality of mere clodhopper melodrama. The last act is dramatically effective; but the last act, reaching up to the redemptive power of love, should be tragically exalted...