Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Elected by the exclusive 40 of the French Academy to join their "immortal" numbers, poetic Director Rene Clair, 61, shocked his new fellows a trifle by proclaiming in his acceptance speech: "It's so much easier to be immortal while living than after death...
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (French). Love redeems even the horror of acres of charred and moaning humanity in this New Wave that rises with atomic power and breaks with poetic beauty...
When Italian Poet Salvatore Quasimodo learned last October that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature, friends report that "he paled and fell into shocked silence." Given Quasimodo's widely unheralded poetic output, it was a natural reaction. In the U.S., where only a few academic specialists knew more than a handful of his poems, the news caused acute embarrassment to cocktail-party literati, who were too stunned to improvise knowledgeable chatter. In Sweden the respected newspaper Aftenbladet criticized the Swedish Academy for "rewarding mediocrity," and most Italian critics agreed. One of Quasimodo's detractors spread...
...question is, does he pack enough poetic dynamite to please the shade of a Nobel? Giving him the highest possible marks and allowing for the poet's most destructive enemy-translation-the answer is still no. Quasimodo does not often descend to the banalities of To the New Moon, first published in a Communist paper in celebration of Russia's Sputnik. Mostly he pays in recognizable poet's coin. His world is shrouded in melancholy, in mournful contemplation of man's fate. "Give me sorrow daily bread," and, doubtfully hoping, "perhaps the heart is left...
...Christopher Smart, a mad 18th century English poet, remarked of the cat, in the most wonderful poem ever written on that elusive animal, "he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon." In less poetic terms, the cat has the power of teaching manners to men when they are still children and most need the lesson. Unlike the dog ("beloved of hypocrites," as the astute aelurophile, Charles Baudelaire, observed), the cat will not tolerate abuse, and thus remains master in its own or anyone else's house...