Word: portrait
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...John Wheelwright, who died (aged 43) last month. Harvard-man, architectural historian, Socialist, he was one of the most famous unheard-of poets in the U. S. Wheelwright's reputation is based on several books of crankily learned, lyrically didactic verse. Political Self-Portrait, like its predecessors, is full of what seem like the antics of an annunciatory angel dancing on the top of a Harvard education. But that does not prevent the book from bringing its reader hard up against an incandescent, no-fooling poetical and political faith...
POLITICAL SELF-PORTRAIT-John Wheelwright-Bruce Humphries...
Poetry and politics do not seem like strangers to each other in Wheelwright's book, because its author had no doubt whatever that political freedom and verbal truth are the interrelated objectives of every wide-awake, decent man on earth. Political Self-Portrait is a kind of rebel's hornbook, full of references to the doctrines and deeds of those who Wheelwright felt have most signally helped-and hindered-truth-telling and liberty. On the angels' side, among others, are Prometheus, Jesus Christ, and the old Rev. John. On the other side may be found Cain, Stalin...
...first half of Beecher's poem is made up of a series of portrait-sketches of his ancestral relatives-the blacksmith Beechers whose guns were held at present-arms when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown; Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom Lincoln called "the little lady who made the great war"; Henry Ward Beecher, who, on being handed his diploma at Amherst, was told by the college's president, "Well, this is the last we shall hear of you, Mr. Beecher"; Thomas K. Beecher, who chose to be a small-town preacher...
...resist looking back over their shoulder at the devil of pseudo-sophistication. Two of the other three short stories, by William Abrahams and Martin Collins Johnson, slip at different moments into this fault. The third, Edward Pols' "Porphyro and the Beadsman," is a tedious attempt at a difficult mental portrait which hardly deserves the lead spot in the magazine...