Word: sonnet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...actors started to carry their share of the weight of heightened political and social reality. "I think it is the most hopeful business of movies to find the perfect people rather than the perfect artists," wrote James Agee in a review of National Velvet that was like a prose sonnet to the young Elizabeth Taylor...
...play's points that Caliban, for all his subhuman qualities, is superior to the civilized royalty who wilfully embrace a career of corruption and evil. Shakespeare distilled the idea in Sonnet 94, which ends, "Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds...
...Hazan, puffing on a Vantage, grandly sprays foodstuffs with salt from the box (exclaiming "wirrirriwump!") or dumps ingredients into the pan with a fine disregard for kilos, cups or spoonfuls. "I guess it's like poetry," sighed an English teacher in the class. "First you master the 14-line sonnet, then you go to free verse." Finally, the salivating students get to devour Hazan's three-course meals, washed down with Robert Mondavi's Napa Valley...
Such imaginative leaps are typical throughout The Medusa and the Snail. Though the book is about science, its form is a demonstration of art. In fact, a Thomas essay blooms organically in much the same manner as a romantic ode or sonnet. A receptive mind encounters something in nature; the object out there is gradually drawn into the thinking subject; reflection occurs, hypotheses are put forward and tested, a pulse of excitement becomes audible; suddenly, everything coalesces, time stands still for a moment, an image is born out of matter and spirit. If Wordsworth had gone to medical school...
When Alceste confronts the thinnest skin in the world, the proud author of a new and awful sonnet-he eventually pronounces its creation a "hangable" offense-he does not seem unkind. Scolding Célimène incessantly about her other suitors, he conveys not only jealousy, but some idealistic, crazy, husbandly delusion that she can be transformed into the only perfect being in the world...