Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...metaphysical hammer of God; but his most golden lines were yoked to an ironic, satanic vision of the meanness of a scrap-iron age. He captured, and still captures, the minds of the young; but he personified himself as "an old man in a dry month," and his characteristic poetic voice was that of a man who seemed at least 50 the day he was born...
...life; yet in life he was the model Christian gentleman, kind and good-and in his last years supremely happy. At his death in London last week of pulmonary emphysema, it was clear that Thomas Stearns Eliot, 76, was one of the few major poets of a minor poetic age, and far and away the most influential man of letters of his half of the century...
...never airy in O'Neill. It is obdurate and oppressive, and his characters slash at it and through it with fast talk, sweet talk, crying talk, any kind of talk. It is a poet's speech-not that O'Neill could ever write a poetic line, but in the sense that a poet regards prose as an inadequate tool to express a man's longings. The poignant intensity of O'Neill is that his spoken lines reach unerringly toward what cannot be spoken. Into Erie's speeches filters not the loneliness of country solitude...
...bald theorem, the story is nothing much. But White uses poetic means to suggest the self-defeat of a woman in whose face life has closed its door. Promised a view of an "estuary of black swans," Anthea imagines herself standing on the promontory that is covered by paperbark trees, near enough to see the writhing of the black necks. "Did she altogether want? Or touch the papery bark, flaking down, down around the grey dunny,* into opalescent scales. Sun and wind, to say nothing of moonlight, had worked upon the paper-barks. Better to watch without becoming involved...
...Arms and Legs" is wretchedly written by Jeffrey Steingarten, but "Re: Little Al," by S. T. Wyrick, is so unbelievably stupid and immature that it's good or, maybe, "camp." An unfortunate named Aldrich wrote a story called "No Native Dancer He." One product of his poetic sensibilities: "And everywhere around the floor that we tripped and shuffled was left a brimming tide of sweat...