Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Professor Benjamin Vandegrift, of Washington and Lee, sees a whole new breed of middle-management executives who have graduated from the campus activism of the '60s and are now moving into politics to preserve their dreams. New York's Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is almost poetic on the subject of the entrepreneurial ethos. "The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people," he says. "They were founded by people with extraordinary energy, intelligence, ambition, aggressiveness. All those factors go into the primordial capitalist urge." M.I.T. Professor Louis Banks takes the next step...
...disarmament, Senghor also read some of his poems to 700 listeners at a local community center. "My basic themes," he explained, "are black Africa, brotherhood in suffering, death and, very naturally, love, with emphasis on woman, both black and white." For his next book, Senghor plans a collection of poetic elegies, including one on Martin Luther King...
...Never apologize/ For what you anthologize." So, if anyone had thought of it, might run the motto for this entertaining and occasionally exasperating selection of poetic japes and fripperies. Novelist Kingsley Amis is not just a wickedly funny writer (read Lucky Jim several times); he is also a critic known for his strong and aggressively idiosyncratic opinions. With the venerable Oxford imprimatur on his side, Amis' poetastering now becomes what the next several generations of readers will have to swallow...
...would otherwise have stayed buried. But there is madness in his method. He is happiest being outrageous, and the best way to do that in his native England is to mock liberal pieties. Amis' convincing impersonation of a Colonel Blimp drifting rightward obliges him to include several mediocre poetic slaps at the left that simply do not meet his own standards. He gives space to a few Americans, including Bret Harte, Robert Frost, Peter de Vries and the late Phyllis McGinley. But he omits John Updike, who, when he chooses to be, is probably the best writer of light...
...avoids romanticizing them with a league-of-gentlemen myth. Mostly, the sources of his book are an unsavory lot, greedy and loutish. One, however, had a taste for Flaubert and Wittgenstein, another the skill and nerve to become a professional racing-car driver, and a third possessed a spontaneously poetic soul. He greeted the dawn after the successful holdup with lines from Omar Khayyám: "Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night/ Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight...